Simon makes some unlikely friends, including the sullen young Lord Bakerloo and the irrepressible cockney child Dido Twite. The disreputable family he claimed to be boarding with say, in their turn, that they have never heard of him.Īll the same, Simon begins to work for a wheelwright named Cobb, study at the art academy of the eccentric Furneaux, and make the acquaintance of the even more eccentric Duke of Battersea, whose wife’s lady-in-waiting is none other than Sophie, Simon’s fellow-sufferer at the foundlings school from which he ran away years ago. He immediately runs into difficulty: Field is nowhere to be found. Now it flowers into something positively fantastic: a parallel-history England in which the Stuarts never left the throne (James III is King) and the Hanoverian George is a vile pretender whose supporters are thick with plots.Ī couple of years after the events of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, the charming, gifted goose-boy named Simon comes to London to study painting with his friend, Dr. In The Wolves of Willoughby Chase it seemed unusual enough: a version of 19th century England in which wolves are a constant threat throughout the winter. One of the funny, surprising, and weird things about this series is the setting.
She also knows how to craft tired old plots into breathlessly exciting, funny, surprising, and weird adventures. Daughter of the poet Conrad Aiken, Joan writes with deft wit, original diction, and an ear for dialects and amusing slang. I think this is the second novel in the Wolves series that spans four decades of creativity by one of England’s more prolific children’s authors. Joan Aiken was decorated with an MBE for her services to children's books. Her books are internationally acclaimed and she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the United States as well as the Guardian Award for Fiction in this country for The Whispering Mountain. Both that and Black Hearts in Battersea have been filmed. Amanda Craig, writing in The Times, said, 'She was a consummate story-teller, one that each generation discovers anew.' Her best-known books are those in the James III saga, of which The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first title, published in 1962 and awarded the Lewis Carroll prize.
Joan Aiken wrote over a hundred books for young readers and adults and is recognized as one of the classic authors of the twentieth century. Her first children's novel, The Kingdom of the Cave, was published in 1960. Before joining the 'family business' herself, Joan had a variety of jobs, including working for the BBC, the United Nations Information Centre and then as features editor for a short story magazine. She was the daughter of the American poet, Conrad Aiken her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge, is also a novelist.
0 kommentar(er)
