Third Year at Malory Towers

Third Year at Malory Towers is a novel by the English writer Enid Blyton, first published in 1948. It is the third book of her Malory Towers series of school stories.

Darrell Rivers is on her way back to Malory Towers, and her best friend Sally Hope is in quarantine with mumps and will arrive late. On the journey the girls collect a new pupil called Zerelda Brass, an American who has been staying with her English grandmother. Zerelda is fifteen but appears older, because she wears make-up and lipstick and has had her hair styled in an extravagant fashion.

The other girls are shocked when they see her, having never met anyone like her. The single exception is Gwendoline, who is overcome with admiration. Zerelda is placed in North Tower, but in the Fourth Form, one form above Darrell and her friends, and on her first day there the form mistress, Miss Williams, mistakes her for a new member of the teaching staff and then orders her to remove the make-up and rearrange her hair.

Alongside all of that, tensions rise between Mavis, who arrived at Malory Towers the previous term, and the other girls in the Third Form, and Darrell has her own difficulties to work through over the year.