Meanwhile: “This author does not so much write for children as conscript them, and indeed all of us into her fantastic chiaroscuro. The writing is rich and utterly un-condescending, there is no mercy for stragglers…” Can the two children survive in such dangerous environments? How will they find out Randolph’s secret? If they do find out, will it bring about a change in fortune? But here's the thing: sometimes it doesn't matter how I feel about a book. I can not be wholly comfortable with something, but I can recognise how great it is. I can recognise the mark of an author who is fine, fine, fine with her craft and I can understand how important this might be to somebody just discovering what language is and what it can be shaped to be. I would recommend this without batting an eyelid because it is good, powerful, bold fiction. Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. [2] For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, [3] and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. [4] [a] She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.

THIS is the book I read in Grade 7 that I've been searching for for years! I owe a huge thank-you to GoodReads member Oolookitty who steered me this way after I posted a review of A Chance Child. She recognized the carpet scene I'd remembered from my childhood. It was as nailbiting to read as it was when I was younger, from the winding sewer passages to the factory floor. a b c d e f Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds. Results of Chronologies query on Aiken, Joan within tag Name within all event types, with most comprehensive selectivity, for 0612--BC to 2018-11-28AD, long form results within Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Online, 2006. http://orlando.cambridge.org/. 28 November 2018.

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Happily, her books have all recently been re-issued with fabulous new covers and so are easy to get hold of now. By the actual end I didn't much care about the outcome, just that it did end. Who did Kate choose? Don't actually know, and we can only hope the Druid and Romans were at peace because that wasn't resolved properly either. So why, you ask, do I read Erskine and write this (waaaaaaaay too long) review of a book 15 years old?? His tutor, Oakapple (David Collings), takes him to Midnight Mill, which Sir Randolph owns. There Lucas gains an insight into the appalling conditions suffered by the working class. I thought Midnight is a Place was much better than The Wolves of Willoughby Chase as it wasn't nearly as sentimental.

Aiken was taught at home by her mother until the age of twelve and from 1936 to 1940 at Wychwood School for girls in North Oxford. She did not attend university. Writing stories from an early age, she finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen and had her first short story for adults accepted for publication when she was seventeen. [ citation needed] In 1941 her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour. [6] Patron, Susan (June 2003). School Library Journal. New York: Reed Business Information. 49 (6): 136. ISSN 0362-8930. {{ cite journal}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical ( link)

Guardian children's fiction prize relaunched: Entry details and list of past winners". theguardian.com 12 March 2001. Retrieved 2012-08-01. Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry. My children and I have finally finished all of the books in the Wolves Chronicles, plus Midnight is a Place (which we ended up reading last). My daughter especially was interested in Blastburn, having first read about it in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and then in Is Underground, and was fascinated to hear of it again in Midnight is a Place! Our hometown of Troy, New York was a major industrial city in the nineteenth century with many iron mills and foundries (American steel was first manufactured in Troy, borrowing the process from Britain) and all three ‘Blastburn’ books spurred some interesting discussions about what it would have been like to be a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution. And, my mother, although born in America, grew up speaking only French and had to learn English when she showed up on the first day of school and everyone was jib-jabbering in that strange tongue, so my children could appreciate what Anna-Marie had to go through to learn English! When Randolph sets fire to the mansion killing himself and seriously injuring Oakapple, the two children pool their resources to find work and shelter. Lucas ends up labouring in the sewers and Anne-Marie collects cigarette butts from the street.

Tymn, Marshall B.; Zahorski, Kenneth J.; Boyer, Robert H. (1979). Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide. New York: R.R. Bowker Co. p.39. ISBN 0-8352-1431-1. Includes a decent smattering of historical data (it's not as detailed as she's capable of, but it's there) After her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 1955 and 1960. During this time she also published her first two collections of children's stories and began work on a children's novel, initially titled Bonnie Green, which was later published in 1962 as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. By then she was able to write full-time from home, producing two or three books a year for the rest of her life, mainly children's books and thrillers, as well as many articles, introductions and talks on children's literature and on the work of Jane Austen. It tells the story of a lonely boy named Lucas, who lives at Midnight Court, next to a smoggy industrial town called Blastburn. His guardian is a foul-tempered, brandy-drinking eccentric who won the great house in a card-game many years before.Orphan Lucas Bell is under the guardianship of Sir Randolph Grimsby, privately educated by a a taciturn tutor at the forbidding Midnight Court, hard by the town of Blastburn. As Lucas turns thirteen he is joined by another orphan, Anna-Marie Murgatroyd who, lately come from Calais, speaks only French. Loved the north Essex setting, the heroine was ok until you threw in the annoying ex and the at times psychotic neighbour's son (admittedly that wasn't entirely his fault.). The Druid/Roman relationship was quite touching at times too...BUT Aiken worked for the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in London between 1943 and 1949. In September 1945 she married Ronald George Brown, [1] a journalist who was also working at UNIC. They had two children before he died in 1955.