The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is best read when young, or by those with the ability to tap into their inner girl.I enjoyed the evil impostors who gleefully inflict child abuse. 'Wolves' is best read by kids who love to feel a bit of self-pity and delicious horror.Bonnie is a bit of a simpering t...
This book explodes like a firework in the brain, or perhaps like one of the thirteen volcanoes that encircle the misappropriated lake of the title. The ideas, the plot, the situations go beyond the merely outrageous and into the sublimely wonderful. This is a masterpiece of children's fantasy, an...
I first read this book when I was about 8 or 9 years old, and then somehow or other I must have lost the copy - because as an adult I could never remember the title of it, but it always haunted me as a story which I fell in love with. Then, about 7 or 8 years ago, when I happened to describe it ...
Despite being labeled "Wolves, #6" this was the fourth Aiken wrote; I think that discrepancy threw me when I came back to these books after having devoured them as a child. Not surprisingly, her writing style changed over the years, and it shows in these later Wolves books. (Or why there's still ...
Alas and alack, if Midwinter Nightingale felt underdeveloped, this is sadly undercooked, almost a short story. Nonetheless, Aiken's wit and invention are present on almost every page, just not the energy and not the proper momentum that a book featuring plots about Dido's search for a new heir to...
Man, I love these books. The Wolves of Willoughby chase is really good, and deservedly a classic, but where's the love for Dido Twite? Most people I know don't realize that this was a series (the connection to 'Wolves' is a loose one). I love the little spitfire. Anyway, these were so much fun th...
I first read this book (this entire series) fourteen years ago. Since then, it's been one of my favorite books of all time and Dido Twite one of my favorite characters. Dido and Pa is the Silver Chair of the Wolves Chronicles. It's darker, more complex, and it asks some very good questions. Most ...
Unless there is another Aiken book that starts with a boy meeting an annoying girl on a train, I've actually read this before, although I don't remember much about the plot. You'd think an evil werewolf, a missing king, and wantonly murdered cat would be memorable, though, wouldn't you? Maybe I s...
Not strictly a prequel to the Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence (our young hero Owen Hughes re-appears around the time of the plot to slide St Paul’s Cathedral into the Thames at a coronation, in The Cuckoo Tree), The Whispering Mountain can nevertheless be enjoyed as a standalone novel. It als...
Aiken's many successes have included two novels modeled after those of Jane Austen, Mansfield Revisited and Jane Fairfax. In this crafty sequel to Sense and Sensibility, Aiken uses the precision of Austen's prose to bring to life a heroine more impetuous than the Dashwood sisters ever allowed the...
A charming story of suspense and intrigue in Regency England, this is probably my favorite Joan Aiken novel read to date. What I find so interesting about reading her books is that they do not feel like "make-believe"...they have a very realistic and truthful component which results in an "anythi...
This book is fantastic--but it takes a little time before the magic has fully kicked in. I read this book out of order, so I can't comment on how it fits in the series...so it's even more impressive how much I enjoyed it.Cons: The beginning often feels cliched and heavy-handed, and you don't real...
Felix Brooke, the orphaned son of an English soldier and an aristocratic Spanish mother, has been raised in the strict, loveless household of his grandfather in Villaverde, Spain. When Felix gains possession of a letter that contains a clue to the whereabouts of his father’s family, he gladly run...
Two extraordinary tales, and many fates, intertwine in this magnificent novel of India and England in the last years of the eighteenth century. Sixteen-year-old Fanny Paget, newly married to the odious Captain Paget, had come to live with him and his grown daughters at the Hermitage, a house lent...
I love the Edward Gorey cover. Aiken and Gorey go together perfectly well. Aiken and Gorey sounds like the name of some sort of weird and gothic medical drama, sort of like House, if House investigated talking warts and haemogoblins and phantom limbs where you have an extra pair of hands doing un...
"It ain't my zoo really, Arabel, you know. I'm just the head warden, and your aunt Effie runs the cafeteria," said Uncle Urk. "The zoo belongs to Lord Donisthorpe." "Does he have lions and tigers?" "No, he hasn't got any of those. He likes grass-eating animals mostly—wildebeests and zebras and gi...
‘Is not having bigbang?’ ‘Your big bang, my dear professor, would leave this island in a devilish undesirable location.’ ‘Could firing otherwards round world mayhaps?’ the Professor said hopefully. ‘I fixing nordwestbang.’ ‘No, no, professor, that would push us out into the middle of the Atlantic...
She felt hideously unwell – an unsual and unwelcome state for Lady Catherine, who, all her life, had enjoyed excellent health, so much so that the sting of a bee or a touch of indigestion were the severest ills she had ever suffered. Now her bones ached, she seemed to be covered with bruises and ...
Procuring work at the foundries presented no problem. The manager was, indeed, so amazed that somebody should actually volunteer instead of being dragged, confused and protesting, off a wagon, that he offered Is a fairly safe job shovelling coke, but she said she’d rather work on the bellows that...
Yates paid her next visit to Mansfield, and she could be spared from an hour’s attendance on Lady Bertram, to walk across the park and call at the Parsonage. By this time Mrs. Osborne had arrived, and was installed as lady of the house. Her brother, the Reverend Francis, S...
Fierce little flakes stung and clung; they climbed and caked on the windows; and Dakin sighed as he thought of all the extra cleaning and polishing that would be necessary the next day. “But this weather should help to discourage the Snarks,” said Major Scanty, rubbing his hands together as he lo...
“Timothy, how often have I told you?” she said. “You have got to show your working. Even if these were the right answers—which they are not—I should give you no marks for them, because no working is shown. How, may I ask, did you arrive at this answer?” Her felt-tip made t...
These, though they were, of course, all in the severest unrelieved black, were far superior in style and material to any that Juliana had ever possessed before: she tried on a silk dress, high-waisted, with a double ruffle running down the front of the skirt, a V-necked bodice with a fichu round ...
said Is next morning. She and Arun had breakfasted scantily off a loaf, which Is went out and bought in Wear Street, and they were now making a rather hopeless attempt to clean the filthy kitchen with brooms and rags and pails full of sea water, scooped from the high tide which chomped and frothe...
said Mrs. Armitage, looking over her coffee-cup at the little heap of sixpences on the sideboard, “the children have forgotten to take their lunch money to school. You could go that way to the office and leave it, couldn't you, darling?" The house still reverberated from the slam of the front doo...
It contained a large bare table and several stools, besides many shelves holding enormous platters and dishes. No other inhabitants of the house were to be seen, and yet there was an atmosphere of hurry and trouble; somewhere in the distance they could hear hasty footsteps; and the clamour of rai...