Children's Classics and Modern Classics: Midnight is a Place

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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! The one bright spot among the cast is Lally Bowers performance as Lady Murgatroyd. After starring the same year in "The Peppermint Pig", she adjusts very well to portray the elder heiress of the carpet-pressing factory who is out to crush the hopes and dreams of anyone who dares attempt to take over family business. Very convincing. 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. 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) My copy of this wonderful book was bought from the Glebe Library years ago, and still has its yellow cardboard filing card in an envelope glued inside the front cover.

I live for those moments in an Erskine book, and she delivers. Regardless of my frustration with her characters, regardless of my wasted time spent wandering the frozen Essex shoreline in search of a decent plot, and in spite of my book hurling spleen vented at the abrupt and lousy ending, I love it when a good Erskine sentence makes me glance surreptiously around the room in search of the shadow I thought I just saw out of the corner of my eye. When the two children decide to move into the Ice House that stands next to the ruins of Midnight Court, they meet Lady Murgatroyd (Lally Bowers) whose past is intertwined with that of Oakapple. The series is being re-shown in the Autumn of 2020 on Talking Pictures TV in the UK on weekend mornings at 9.00am 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? Just....no. Don't do it, Barbara. It's painful to read and there's no reason to bog down a good spookie with a cast of immature characters masquerading as adults in love. I've found that the typical Erskine heroine is generally a decorative doormat in search of a ghost to rescue them from their romantic folly. The Erskine male normally has the emotional maturity of an Adam Sandler fan club president (which really makes it quite impressive that they can STILL manage to wipe their feet on said doormat heroine).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 Joan Aiken is one of my all-time favourite children’s writers. Her books were out-of-print for a while and I haunted second-hand bookshops in the hopes of building up my collection. 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.

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]A Rainy Day (Дождливая история, 1988), [11] adapts The Baker's Cat and is set to Paul Whiteman's 1928 song Chiquita and other jazz standards 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 to a friend, they said 'you mean Midnight is a Place by Joan Aiken.' So I bought a new copy, and re-read it - again and again. I would say that it's probably one of the most influential children's books I ever read. It explores the idea of child labour and child poverty in a way that completely captivated me when I was 9. It's set around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and shows children having to work in the Lancashire cotton mills, the kind of conditions they had to tolerate. The little ink or pencil illustrations were particularly captivating to me as a child, showing the 'snatcher' - the girl who had to run out onto the carpet beneath a big massive press, which would squash her if she tripped and fell. Her job was to remove any spare bits of fluff from the carpet, which would spoil the design if they were left in place when the press came down. So the 'snatcher' was also the fastest, smallest child - and their life expectancy was not very long. This is the 'hook' if you like, into the novel - particularly for child readers. For this is based on a true fact, I believe. The illustration of this in the book mesmerized me, the idea that a child would be subjected to that. It has to be added, of course, that in some parts of the world child labour still is an issue, and we are all part of the machine which perpetuates it, whether we like it or not. The wolves of Willoughby Chase in libraries ( WorldCat catalog) – immediately, first edition. Retrieved 2012-08-01. Lucas is bored and longs for a friend but doesn’t get quite what he hoped for when French girl Anne-Marie (Maxine Gordon) comes to stay at the Court.

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.

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In Lucas and Anna-Marie we have two distinctive protagonists, one creative and self-effacing, the other feisty and practical -- it's as though they represent twin aspects of the author herself. The journey from middleclass respectability to a hand-to-mouth penury working in sewers, in a textile mill, making cigars anew from discarded butts and so on is both heartbreaking and yet heartwarming, especially when friends are found in the most unlikely of places and in the direst of circumstances. This book was fantastic. It was entertaining, mysterious and scary, wrapped up all together to make a great combination. It's not a story to read late at night for those easily frightened. Her stories are fabulously inventive, and often have surprising elements in them (like pink whales).