What did you think of Jo?
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Did you adore Jo when you read the books as a child?
Yes!
63%
 63%  [ 52 ]
Yes, but only when she was Jo Bettany.
24%
 24%  [ 20 ]
Yes, but only when she was Jo Maynard.
2%
 2%  [ 2 ]
No.
9%
 9%  [ 8 ]
Total Votes : 82

#1: What did you think of Jo? Author: Fatima, Location: Sunny Qatar PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 1:56 pm
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We seem to do quite a lot of Jo bashing, and as adults lots of us find Jo annoying, especially in the latter part of the series. So that made me wonder - when you were reading the books as a child/teenager did you love Jo or did she irritate you then, too?
#2:  Author: Alison H, Location: Manchester PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 2:03 pm
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I liked young Jo, until round about the time she became Head Girl. It was annoying the way Madge wouldn't let the wind blow on her, but Jo seemed to find it annoying too. And I could certainly identify with the "history dreaming".

In the Swiss books in particular she annoys me, though! I think she always did, although not as much as she does now.
#3:  Author: Squirrel, Location: St-Andrews or Dunfermline PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 2:47 pm
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Hmmmm - clarify 'adore'! I liked her, and enjoy reading about her (whatever age) even now. But early Simone type hype... No. More like a Frieda/Marie type thing probably - or later Simone of course. I guess I do prefer the young Jo - but that's more because I like that young enthusiasm - and we don't see quite so much of the elder Joey.
#4:  Author: Lisa A., Location: North Yorkshire PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:00 pm
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I found her a bit alarming in School At when I was aged about 9/10 - all that super-confidence and frantic energy. If I had met her at that age I would have been a bit of a Simone and she would have pushed me out of the way in irritation. I prefer her now I am an adult and (I hope!) not intimidated by the likes of Joey Maynard.
#5:  Author: Caroline, Location: Manchester PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 3:11 pm
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I like her and always have. Simple as that. I can see why others find her a pain, but I tend to attribute her potentially annoying characteristics to EBD's affection for her, and can't bring myself to get cross with Jo herself.

If that doesn't make me sound mad!

What I can't quite understand is, if someone absolutely, unequivocally detests Jo, why they would read / adore a series of books in which she is the lead character. I'm not saying anyone has to like all the characters the author likes (although I find I have a tendancy to take characters at EBD's valuation / suspend all my critical faculties a bit too much sometimes!), but is it fun reading about people you really, really dislike when the authorial view is quite the opposite? I think it would just get me worked up and cross and I'd have to stop reading...

No offence meant to anyone who doesn't like Joey. I'm genuinely curious.
#6:  Author: leahbelle, Location: Kilmarnock PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:05 pm
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As a child, I adored Jo as both a schoolgirl and adult. I wanted to be like her at school and get up to all the exciting things she did. I admired her as an adult and hoped I'd be like her when I was a parent - though perhaps with slightly fewer children!

As an adult, I am not keen on grown up Joey. She is far too bossy and interfering and has a very unhealthy fixation with the School. I do still like schoolgirl Jo, though, and she'll always be one of my favourite characters from the earlier books.
#7:  Author: Clare, Location: Liverpool PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:15 pm
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As a child I thought she was fantastic. She was clever in the same areas as me, friendly and involved in all that was going on around her.

As an adult she starts to grate in the later books. It annoys me that she's the only parent who is really involved with the school and makes a huge fuss if she can't see her girls when she wants to (e.g. when they've got something contagious). Other parents don't see their child for months!
#8:  Author: Lesley, Location: Allhallows, Kent PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:18 pm
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While reading the books I like her - I suspend all disbelief and snter EBD's world. But when I look back on them I can say that I like the child Joey, she was a child with both gifts and faults, but as an adult, especially in the Swiss years, she would be someone that I could take only in small doses. I think EBD made a big mistake in augmenting her gifts and reducing, almost to non-existence, her faults. And it annoys me when others refer back to how wonderful she was as a student and Head Girl - she doesn't come across as such in those books.
#9:  Author: Mrs Redboots, Location: London, UK PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:50 pm
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I've always liked her, but have to agree that the adult Joey is far less rounded a character than the schoolgirl. Even still, I like her!
#10:  Author: Róisín, Location: Ireland PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:47 pm
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As a child, I always adored her. I don't think there was any character in the series I *didn't* adore as a child!
#11:  Author: Kate, Location: Ireland PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:00 pm
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Róisín wrote:
As a child, I always adored her. I don't think there was any character in the series I *didn't* adore as a child!


Thekla? Laughing Laughing
#12:  Author: Pat, Location: Doncaster PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:52 pm
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When I'm reading anything a suspend my disbelief - I wouldn't enjoy fantasy if I didn't. When we are discussing characters I can see the flaws, and I agree that Jo is less rounded in the Swiss books. But they are the ones that are less well written anyway. I think that the main problem is that EBD wanted to keep her in the series as a link running right through them all, but once Jo had left school it became much harder to find a legitimate reason for having her around. That's why it seems so contrived having her move with the school everywhere.
#13:  Author: Tara, Location: Malvern, Worcestershire PostPosted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 11:17 pm
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Caroline wrote:
I tend to attribute her potentially annoying characteristics to EBD's affection for her, and can't bring myself to get cross with Jo herself.
If that doesn't make me sound mad!
Yes, quite mad - but I do so understand what you mean! I get very annoyed with EBD when she makes my favourite character do something or react in a way I know she never would! Completely barking!

I loved Jo as a child and still think she holds the whole series together, though she is by no means my favourite character. The thing I like least about her now is her behaviour when she is a senior at school, it's often very childish and petulant - but it didn't strike me like that in my youth, and I thought she was a lovely mum.
#14:  Author: Fiona Mc, Location: Bendigo, Australia PostPosted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 4:18 am
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I remember as a kid I really liked her both as a child and adult. I do remember thinking then and now that I wanted to get to know other characters more and she always seemed to be there, taking over. There were other characters I really wanted to know as well. Its funny, everyone complains she was always in them even in Swiss books but I remember being annoyed she was around in the year after she left school. I was hoping there would be more about the others. I guess thats why I like these drabbles so much. I get to find out about characters I always wanted to read more about.
#15:  Author: Elbee, Location: Surrey PostPosted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 9:03 am
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When reading the books as a child I really liked Joey (both when young and as Jo Maynard) and felt I would have loved her to be my friend. Then re-reading them in my late teens I wasn't so keen on the grown up Jo but couldn't fully put my finger on the reason why. Now, many years on I can see exactly why I became less keen on Jo as an adult, but I can still remember my affection for her from when I was a child, and whenever I re-read the CS books I imagine I am 10 years old again! Therefore I can see her faults but they don't bother me!
#16:  Author: Loryat,  PostPosted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 3:10 pm
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When I was a child I liked both Jos, though I preferred the child Jo cos I was a child too. I think Jo Bettany is a brilliant character.

Jo Maynard may not be so hot, but she has lots of lovely moments.
#17:  Author: Rebecca, Location: Oxford PostPosted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 10:03 am
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I liked Jo in all her guises and I remember being disappointed to come across the books when she was in Canada and not featured as a main character. reading them now, adult Jo is rather irritating at times but I still like her on the whole and can suspend my irritation whilst reading.
#18:  Author: Jennie, Location: Cambridgeshire PostPosted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 2:09 pm
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Jo was all right when she was a young schoolgirl, she was just as thoughtless and naughty as the others, but as she grows older, she is far too intrusive and omnipresent.

What I really wanted was SCHOOL stories, not another version of Joey sorts out problem girl/family/adopts another child/discovers a far-fetched relationship.

A case in point is at he end of 'Island'. I didn't want to know what part Jo played in the ending. Her narrative takes about nine pages, and it's mostly about her and why she went to Penny Rest. For goodness sake, a lot of us have had to cope with teething children and almost sleepless nights, and some of us had to get ready and go to work the next day,or get up and look after other children and do housework. Jo had
Anna to do all that for her, so she wasn't exactly the martyr to teething that she pretends to be. So, I really didn't want all that information about Jo, I found it intrusive, I just wanted to see the denouement between Annis' father and her aunt. It would have been far more dramatic to see it first hand, not filtered through Jo Maynard and her complaints. That was one occasion when EBD dragged her in totally unnecessarily. the drama lay in Annis' situation, not in Jo's child's teething problems. It would have been good to see the reunion between Annis and her father, too.
#19:  Author: jennifer, Location: Taiwan PostPosted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 4:41 am
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I only read a few scattered books as a child, so my impression of Jo was very odd - I had read Exploits, Goes to It, Tom Tackles, Problem, Excitements and Feud - she's head girl in one, a young mother in two, and mother of schoolgirls and general butter in in three.

As an adult I enjoy young Joey, even if the character is rather overdrawn. She tends to extremes, being either absolutely brilliant or totally terrible at things, with little middle ground. She does, however, have good and bad traits - she's friendly, soft hearted, musical, a natural leader, very loyal to her friends and family, energetic and creative, but she's also immature, prone to sulking and fits of wild behavior, impulsive, untidy and has poor self control.

Young adult Joey is also a good character - seeing her start a family, interacting with Daisy and Robin, having kids, her grief when Jack is missing. Her attachment to the school is a bit obsessive, but understandable given the circumstances. She's living on the Sonnalpe, where there aren't many 18 year old single girls, and then later she moves with Madge during the war, and Jack is away, so the school adds extra support.

I think it's about when Jo moves to Carnback so she's beside the school again that her character starts to deteriorate. That's when her obsessive need to have the biggest family starts cropping up, and her need to be at the school becomes less believable.

Basically, Joey, as a character, doesn't develop at all after the war years. In the Swiss books she actually goes backwards. Things that were once regarded as faults are now dropped, or become virtues. She shows up primarily as an over used plot device (new girl has problems, Joey talks to her, problems go away).

In the holiday books, where we see Joey away from the school, I find her rather overwhelming. She's on *all the time*, having important chats with random girls, hauling people along on vacation, organising outings, scheduling nap times, having swimming races, etc, all while Anna and Rosli take care of the babies.
#20:  Author: Loryat,  PostPosted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 4:48 pm
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Jennie wrote:

A case in point is at he end of 'Island'. I didn't want to know what part Jo played in the ending. Her narrative takes about nine pages, and it's mostly about her and why she went to Penny Rest. For goodness sake, a lot of us have had to cope with teething children and almost sleepless nights, and some of us had to get ready and go to work the next day,or get up and look after other children and do housework. Jo had
Anna to do all that for her, so she wasn't exactly the martyr to teething that she pretends to be. So, I really didn't want all that information about Jo, I found it intrusive, I just wanted to see the denouement between Annis' father and her aunt. It would have been far more dramatic to see it first hand, not filtered through Jo Maynard and her complaints. That was one occasion when EBD dragged her in totally unnecessarily. the drama lay in Annis' situation, not in Jo's child's teething problems. It would have been good to see the reunion between Annis and her father, too.


I think the way EBD saw it was that in order to get the confrontation in she had to have Joey there or else she'd have been breaking out of her genre, moving away from the school at the end of the book which she never does (unless its to a location that is closely linked with the school, such as the San, or the Maynard or Russell homes). Keeping the narrative in a Chalet setting (ie one inhabited by Joey) is how EBD includes the confrontation. I never liked it (the sheer coincidence of it annoys me) but I can understand why EBD did it.

The only other thing she could have done is somehow got the aunt and father to both come to the school, which given the aunt's character would have been completely unlikely. The confrontation as it is preserves the narrative integrity because characters behave just as you would have expected. But to have the unloving aunt come to the school with probably a completely unconvincing reason for being there would have been even less believable than Joey just 'happening' to be at the same hotel as the aunt.
#21:  Author: JayB, Location: SE England PostPosted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 4:57 pm
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The worst thing about that was the way Jo went and repeated it all to - the Christies, wasn't it? She might just possibly at a stretch have been justified in telling Hilda, but it was nothing to do with the Christies. And really it was Captain Lovell's business and up to him who was told about it. A more appropriate way round it would have been for Captain Lovell to come to the school and tell Hilda, but it wouldn't have been so dramatic.
#22:  Author: LauraM, Location: Bournemouth, Dorset PostPosted: Sun Apr 15, 2007 10:33 pm
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I have to say I adored Joey when I was a child, and even now in my twenties she's probably still my favourite character.

However, there are, in my opinion, significant differences between Joey Bettany and Joey Maynard and she seems to change practically overnight. Joey Maynard was a far less rounded character than her younger self and appears to spend far more time butting into the affairs of the school and the pupils than she spends on her family.

Having said that, the books were a major part of my childhood and I tend to see them and the characters through rose-tinted spectacles because they remind be of being young.
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