One of the very worst things you can hear as a child coming home to find that your room has been ‘Spring Cleaned’ must be: “Oh you didn’t want that did you? I thought you’d finished with it.’ This was clearly a memory from Joan Aiken’s own childhood, and she turned it into one of [...]
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By: Lizza Aiken,
on 4/29/2013
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 4/29/2009
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3 Comments on Some Rather Disastrous Spring Cleaning…, last added: 5/3/2013
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Blog: The Mumpsimus (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: sales, Announcements, craziness, Small Beer Press, Add a tag
This is the craziest sale I've ever seen. Small Beer Press needs to make some room in their warehouse, and so they're selling a selected group of backlist titles for $1 each, plus shipping. I got the two Small Beer books I didn't already have (Endless Things and Water Logic, which I didn't have simply because they're parts of series I haven't read, but for $1...) and a couple I plan to give to people as random gifts. It's great stuff -- brilliant collections of short fiction by Alan DeNiro and Kelly Link and Maureen McHugh, Angelica Gorodsicher's extraordinary Kalpa Imperial, etc. Stock up!
1 Comments on $1 Small Beer, last added: 4/30/2009
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I read “The Serial Garden” last night for the first time, and the minute Mrs. Armitage started her spring cleaning I had a feeling something horrible was coming. (My concern was that Mark would be in the garden when the worst occurred.) I had to close the book when I finished the story. I know it’s fiction, “only a story” as my college English teacher, Mr. Carter, would say. How do readers get so invested in fictional characters that they care what happens and want it to turn out differently? (Each time I reread certain tragedies, I keep hoping that this time the author will have pulled some strings and rescued the hero or heroine from an untimely end.) It’s an homage to Joan Aiken’s art that she can make us wish Mrs. Armitage’s cleaning jag had been delayed (or that Mr. Johansen had had fewer dogs in his care).
Absolutely! I found Joan’s capacity for writing fictional tragedy even more alarming, as it made her rather too similar to Mrs Armitage – who was after all the person who had originally wished for her family to have magical adventures – it seems that they could both have an alarming blind spot about magic when they reverted to being a mother!!!
Only recently finished this, but yes I was also shocked by the cavalier tidying up of Mark’s bedroom (though it’s the sort of thing my would do too) and pleased at Joan’s attempts to make some amends. Though having Mr Johansen reappear in the village in a later story after seemingly becoming a magician’s assistant was just a little confusing!
I also loved the way the two siblings scarcely aged despite the world changing around them. Reminded me a bit of the Famous Five who also had uncountable summer holidays apparently without even Julian having to leave for university or a job in the City…