Internat auf Probe by Dagmar Hoßfeld
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One of my major interests is education and I have long been intrigued by books about boarding schools. One of the reasons I enjoy them is that sometimes you get glimpses of what the schooling is like, but you also usually get an in-depth view of the children in various aspects of their lives. I know there is significant literary analysis of the fact that children in literature are frequently left to their own devices, without adults to limit them or protect them. Boarding schools seem to be a mid-point between being orphaned or abandoned and therefore alone in the world and living at home with parents. The teachers at the schools are free to take on all sorts of personalities and varied relationships with the students, and there are still people around to help with problems, to provide companionship, and to be obstacles to overcome.
This book is a fairly standard boarding school book. The MC likes it at first, then has problems with kids and/or schooling and doesn't like it, then finally ends up loving it (or, in some other books, simply coming to terms with it). It is written for slightly younger children than many of the boarding school books and seems a bit cautious about going into problems too deeply. It is an "everyday life" sort of book, in that the problems are ones that could and do occur in real life. My children loved this kind of book when they were middle-grade age - it seems to talk about things that could happen to them.
As an adult, I found the book a bit too predictable and too simple. But the German vocabulary and speaking speed was enough to challenge me and to keep my interest up.
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