Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7780 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
Continuing where "The Other Side of the Dale" ended, Gervase Phinn begins his second year as a schools inspector in Yorkshire. His colourful cast of characters are now becoming firm favourites - the mostly mad staff at County Hall, the teachers who range from saints to stand-ins, and of course the children themselves who find ways of embarrassing school inspectors with innocent ease. Gervase's colleagues rag him unmercifully about his faraway look whenever the name of Christine Bentley of WinneryNook Nursery and Primary School is mentioned, and he realises it is time to take action - but how to put the question? Gervase Phinn has an extraordinary talent to entertain, and "Over Hill and Dale" will make you laugh out loud.

Customer Reviews

Over Hill and Dale
I have read all of the five "Dales" books as I am a former teacher turned teaching assistant who works in a primary school in the same area where Gervase Phinn used to work. I feel that I can relate to the stories as I often see and hear the most humorous things that children say and the teaching staff encounter! The books are "unputdownable" and draw the reader straight into the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales. I think that Gervase Phinn has a natural talent for storytelling as these 5 books show. Also if you ever get the chance, do go and see him live, his stage show is brilliant.

Yorkshire Tales to Warm the Heart
Gervase Phinn writes in the way you imagine most teachers would - with a wry view of the world supported with anecdotes from the classroom. The result in this case is a tale that I could not put down.

Phinn describes superbly the landscape and attitudes of Yorkshire. If you have lived there and loved it as I have, then so much of this will ring true.

I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone who is diconbobulated by the violence and harshness of City living - a true tonic!

Probably better on the radio
If you like clichés, one-dimensional characters, unrealistic dialogue, inconsequential stories, saccharin-sweet sentimentality and repetition, then this is the book for you. Alternatively, you can read the book, as I did, during a bout of fever and let Gervase Phinn's aimless meanderings rev up your delirium.

It's a rare author who can achieve what Gervase Phinn has done in creating the characters of his colleagues - men who bicker so tediously the the reader finds himself fast-forwarding to the end of their conversation in the certain knowledge that he will not have missed anything either important or amusing. A previous reviewer notes that the funniest moment, the summit of Phinn's comedic art, was an epidemic of head-lice. That really says it all about the comic achievements of "Over Hill and Dale".

And thoe characters. The men are infantile. The women are either harridans or as wet as Yorkshire puddles. (The exception, a sassy female school inspector, is wheeled on for the sake of a painfully-predictable little pseudo-feminist anecdote and then disappears from view for the rest of the book.) The narrator himself comes across as a naive prig.

I tried reading short passages aloud to myself, in order to understand why "Over Hill and Dale" was so popular when on the radio. And indeed, when you slow the prose down to speaking pace the bombardment of of clichés becomes more tolerable. So, in the desire to conclude on a positive note, let it be recorded that I can not recommend this book too strongly to slow readers.