Joan Aiken?

[AlidaART]

Just recently I picked up Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and was enormously impressed. Children's classic? Oh, most certainly. Just plain classic, children's or otherwise? That too.

Wolves, I know, is one of a very lengthy series of books revolving mainly around the adventures of Simon the gooseboy from the first book, and his friend Dido Twite. So, I checked my rather small, ancient local library for these woefully out of print books, and found only one, the second-to-last in the series that ended upon the author's death with a fourteenth book. But now that I'd had a taste of Aiken I couldn't stop, so I took this thirteenth book, Midwinter Nightingale, out of the library.

I was even more impressed. Joan Aiken has written some seriously haunting, emotional action novels, ones that I think would really appeal to fans of the Young Wizards series. So, have any of you read them? What did you think of them? Do you think it's fair to make a comparison to the YW books, or even possible? Or are they in another realm entirely? I rather think not, but please, tell me what you think.

[Peter Murray]

Amazon is being very uninformative about her books. I'm sure I read some of them in the 60s, but I can't remember the titles.
Gobbolino the Witches' Cat sounds familiar, though it seems to be the title of a collection by different writers, so may not be one of hers anyway. I think I've read either The Wolves of Willoughby Chase or Black Hearts in Battersea - or maybe I saw a TV adaptation of one of them in the 70s or so.

So, I suppose, all I can say now is that I do remember reading something by her, but I just can't remember anything about it .

I was hoping Amazon would jog my memory better than they actually did. I ended up looking at Waterstones' site instead, as they seemed better at it.

[AlidaART]

Hm. I believe there was a BBC adaptation of Wolves in the sixties or seventies, which is, like most of the books, very much unavailable over here in the states. (And even getting it shipped over wouldn't be worth it because it would be the wrong format anyhow...)

Amazon is useless for books that are out of print. It's really a travesty that they're so unavailable-- they're so very good; I mean, she won the Lewis Carroll award for Wolves, among many other medals and the like that she acquired during her 50+ year career (she died in 2004, sadly). Regardless. What I mean to say is, I'm afraid the thing to do is to seek them out in used bookstores or dig through the children's sections of every library you come across. (Then again, I did that, and found the entire collection at a library about an hour and a half from my home, which was very tempting but of absolutely no use to me in reality.)

EDIT: Actually, the Wolves film was made in 1989; I looked it up on IMDB.