Adventures in Room 407: The Girls of Canby Hall

The word “tween” is older than I’d thought, dating back in the sense that we’re discussing here to 1988. There are other uses of it going back centuries earlier, but “kid in their preteen years” is fairly modern. However, my goodness was there a lot of literature for us in the years just before then. Especially for girls. I’ve written about it before, but one of the things that lived in my head from the Scholastic Book Fair of the past that I’d never actually gotten around to reading was The Girls of Canby Hall, by “Emily Chase.” Yes, we’ve got an author in quotation marks again. It’s a little surprising at this point to discover that Ann M. Martin is a real person, as was Francine Pascal.

There are two different sets of girls from Canby Hall. The hall itself is a private boarding school near-ish to Boston, founded in 1897 after the death of its founder’s daughter, Julia Canby, of scarlet fever. The series opens with three girls moving into room 407 of Baker Hall. (The other two dorms are Addison and Charles, which, uh, yes.) Shelley is from Iowa and constantly referred to as “plump.” Dana is from Manhattan and stylish. Faith is from Washington, DC, and black. When they graduate, they are replaced by Andy, Jane, and Toby, equally clear in personality.

Or so I assume. Unlike many other girls’ books, these have basically disappeared. There are a few on the Internet Archive, but they’re all from the first era. However, it’s a random assortment and doesn’t have the first one, where the girls hate each other for eight chapters before their housemother, Alison, gets them to make up and bond. It also doesn’t have the second one, where Shelley is kidnapped. I had to seek out summaries online to discover why the hell anyone would kidnap a middle-class farm girl in the first place. (It turns out she’s mistaken for a different girl, which from what little of the series I’ve read should be impossible.) I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen these at a Little Free Library and seldom at thrift stores or used bookstores.

In my experience, they’re only somewhat better than Sweet Valley High and not as good as The Baby-Sitters Club. The girls are older, and there’s much more focus on romance, than the latter; the plots are mostly in the ones I read more plausible than in the former, but there is that kidnapping, the original girls’ nemesis is the daughter of a Hollywood star, and there appears to be a royal wedding late in the series. There are certainly fewer of them than a lot of the other books we’ve covered. There are thirty-five books published from 1984-1989, which appears to mean we went downhill awfully fast.

What’s more, I only read four or five of them—again, not a lot available at this late date—and I was already able to pick up on changes in characterization. It appears, based on what other people have written, that what school Faith’s sister goes to changes from book to book. One of the books I read had Shelley’s failing French as a major plot point; a different book had it be one of the other girls, one who had tutored Shelley, who was doing poorly in it. Apparently Casey, the tomboy for whom Shelley is mistaken in the kidnapping book, becomes their close friend in the first book, but she doesn’t even appear in the first one I read. Boyfriends shift around a bit as well.

Now, yes, there were multiple authors. Emily Chase was a house name, and I don’t think we know all of the authors who actually wrote the books. Julie Garwood, who primarily writes historical or suspenseful romance, wrote one, and that’s as much information as I have. (The plot on hers is Problematic.) But surely, surely there was a story bible of some sort that would let you know which girl was taking what class and what college a girl’s sister attends and so forth. They kept better track of these things in Sweet Valley than Greenleaf, clearly.

Oh, right, and the racism. Faith is black. You will never be able to forget this. Every time a new black male character appears, someone suggests he is perfect for Faith. Her father was a police officer killed in the line of duty. Her mother is a social worker. I’m pretty sure she actually has white boyfriends over the course of the series, but I’m not sure any of the black male characters stick around for more than one book, as none of the books I could find were in a row. Also, the boys aren’t described as distinctly as the girls except for What’s-His-Name the horse rancher. (I read three books with him in them and it didn’t stick.)

And the body-shaming! Shelley is plump. Is she too plump to be an actress? She might be! She should be dieting, but she wants to eat a sandwich of chocolate graham crackers, marshmallow, and peanut butter! She exercises, because she’s plump! Jane Fonda workout tape for Shelley! How her hair looks exactly changes several times over the course of the books I read—apparently it isn’t as silky as What’s-His-Name’s, though—but the most positive description we get is that her figure isn’t as bad as she thinks it is, with the still faint implication that, yes, she needs to lose at least ten pounds.

Shelley’s also super annoying, if you want my opinion. She’s got a town boyfriend and a home boyfriend, and how and if that got reconciled I don’t know because I didn’t have access to any book where that happened. But she spends an entire book weeping about it while Dana’s trying to figure out what state she’ll be living in the next year. Faith is bland and Dana is obsessive in a different way, but Shelley’s super into making everything she does everyone else’s problem despite also, you know, spending an entire book fooling around with What’s-His-Name behind Dana’s back. Despite also already having two boyfriends.

Would I like these better if I’d read them in about 1987? Eh, maybe. But there’s a reason I didn’t read them in about 1987. They didn’t look appealing to me then, and having read a few, there’s only so much I can care about it now. I wonder about class issues—how do Faith’s mother and Shelley’s parents even afford Canby Hall? I find the relationships ridiculous. But I would imagine there are a lot of women my age who haven’t thought about these books in years who now want to tell you ever than you ever knew had been written about Pamela, the villain of the piece.

But one thing I’ll note that goes harder in these books than in any other series we’ve covered is making it Of Its Time. Friends, these books were in the eighties. The girls mainline Tab. Big-city Dana explains to hick Shelley what an answering machine is. The aforementioned Jane Fonda workout tape. One of the girls is worried that someone will see her as too preppy. She is wearing blue corduroys, a yellow shirt, and a pink sweater vest. I’m frankly shocked I didn’t come across a single reference to Lisa Frank in these.