Title: Kate at Melling
Author: Margaret Biggs
Publisher: Girls Gone By
Date: 2008
Pages: 177
Format: Paperback
Series: Melling Series, number 8
Description
Kate Lacey doesn’t want to go to Melling School. It doesn’t matter that her mother Helen, and Aunts Libby, Susan, Roddy and Laura were all so happy there. Kate is different – she’s shy and uncertain of herself and hates the thought of living away from home. But her parents feel she needs a little gentle pushing out of the world, so Kate sets off reluctantly to spend her first term at Melling. It helps that her aunt Libby is also starting as the new maths teacher, but it’s still hard work. The other girls seem so much more confident, and their new form teacher, Miss Mann, is unsympathetic and demanding. Small troubles seem to keep cropping up: where did she lose her pocket money? How can she make friends with Becky who is so prickly about the fact that her dad works for Kate’s father? Gradually Kate starts to find her place, helped by the loving warmth of her family as she returns at weekends, the sometimes unwise interventions of her uncle Phil, and her own steadfastness. The end of the term brings some very happy surprises – both for Kate herself and for the Blake and Lacey families.
This is the first new Melling title to be published for over 50 years, Margaret Biggs writing the story following the good reception her original series has received since being republished by Girls Gone By. Kate at Melling takes place approximately fifteen years after Susan in the Sixth.
