Joan Aiken enjoyed some very happy relationships with her illustrators, notably Pat Marriott, who illustrated her first story collections from 1953 onwards, and was responsible for the first ‘Wolves Chronicles’ covers and pictures, and so helped to create some of the best loved ( and scariest!) characters in the series. Pat became so familiar […]
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By: Lizza Aiken,
on 7/9/2014
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By: Lizza Aiken,
on 4/30/2014
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0 Comments on Story ( and picture) Time! as of 7/9/2014 12:53:00 PM
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One of the most highly praised of Joan Aiken’s historical melodramas is now being republished to celebrate the book’s 40th anniversary. The story of Midnight Court, and two of Aiken’s most unfortunate orphans, the doubly disinherited Lucas and Anna-Marie, was hailed variously as “the stuff of nightmares,” but also as a deeply moving portrayal of […]
3 Comments on Midnight is a Place New 40th Anniversary Edition, last added: 5/1/2014
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So glad this is available again, and with the illustrations. Am I right in thinking this is, however obliquely, set in the same alternate world as the Dido books but unrelated to them?
Reblogged this on Julia Lee Author and commented:
As any regular readers know, I am a big fan of Joan Aiken’s children’s books so I am really happy that Midnight Is A Place is having a new edition and hope it will reach a whole new young audience. And for me, too, as I’m sure this is title of hers I haven’t read!
This is set in a similar time to ‘The Wolves of Willoughby Chase’ but shows a different side to that world – think Blastburn, where Bonnie and Sylvia are sent away – “with its great smoky lights and fearsome fiery glare…and huge slag heaps outlined like black pyramids against the red sky.”
Joan said the idea for the terrifying carpet factory in ‘Midnight is a Place’ came to her in a dream, but turned out on further research to be not unlike the appalling conditions in which children really did work, in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. So yes, an alternate Aiken history, with all the literary style and detail of Hardy or Dickens but with her own addition of heart and humour too!