Tymn, Marshall B.; Zahorski, Kenneth J.; Boyer, Robert H. (1979). Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide. New York: R.R. Bowker Co. p.39. ISBN 0-8352-1431-1.

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! 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. Aiken produced more than 100 books, including more than a dozen collections of fantasy stories, plays and poems, and modern and historical novels for adults and children. She was a lifelong fan of ghost stories, particularly those of M. R. James, Fitz James O'Brien and Nugent Barker. [ citation needed] As well as writing under her own name, she used the pen name Nicholas Dee for several short stories. Some of her books focus on spine-chilling or supernatural events, including The Windscreen Weepers (stories, 1969), The Shadow Guests (novel, 1980), A Whisper in the Night (stories, 1982), and A Creepy Company (stories, 1993, with variant contents in its US and UK editions). She set her adult supernatural novel The Haunting of Lamb House at Lamb House in Rye (now a National Trust property). This ghost story recounts in fictional form an alleged haunting experienced by two former residents of the house, Henry James and E. F. Benson, both of whom also wrote ghost stories.

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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. 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. The wolves of Willoughby Chase in libraries ( WorldCat catalog) – immediately, first edition. Retrieved 2012-08-01. Anne-Marie starts working at Midnight Mil, where she encounters the menacing Bludward (Milton Johns).

Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry. Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories. After her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 1955 and 1960. During this time she also published her first two collections of children's stories and began work on a children's novel, initially titled Bonnie Green, which was later published in 1962 as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. By then she was able to write full-time from home, producing two or three books a year for the rest of her life, mainly children's books and thrillers, as well as many articles, introductions and talks on children's literature and on the work of Jane Austen. Carnegie Medal Award". 2007(?). Curriculum Lab. Elihu Burritt Library. Central Connecticut State University ( CCSU). Retrieved 2012-08-10.A dark tale of unspoken secrets and kind words, sharp practices and generosity, bravery and steadfastness, all set in a grim manufacturing town may not sound ideal fare for young readers, and yet Joan Aiken to my mind has carried it off. While there is no "Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills" there is hope and optimism amongst the tragedy and a determination that creativity can counteract the bleaker side of human contradictions.

Aiken worked for the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in London between 1943 and 1949. In September 1945 she married Ronald George Brown, [1] a journalist who was also working at UNIC. They had two children before he died in 1955. The authoress' French isn't up to much, but that's OK, it's fictional French and I doubt many of her child readers know more than a few words anyway. I think Joan did not include Midnight is a Place as a ‘Wolves’ story, even though the Blastburn setting occurs in the series; I would say it is in quite a different time, maybe much earlier than Wolves of Willoughby?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.

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. Her stories are fabulously inventive, and often have surprising elements in them (like pink whales). Includes a decent smattering of historical data (it's not as detailed as she's capable of, but it's there) Joan Delano Aiken MBE (4 September 1924 – 4 January 2004) was an English writer specialising in supernatural fiction and children's alternative history novels. In 1999 she was awarded an MBE for her services to children's literature. [2] For The Whispering Mountain, published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, she won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a book award judged by a panel of British children's writers, [3] and she was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British writer. [4] [a] She won an Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972) for Night Fall.The series is being re-shown in the Autumn of 2020 on Talking Pictures TV in the UK on weekend mornings at 9.00am But relationships between these four individuals is somewhat strained as suspicions sour the atmosphere, already fouled by the smoke and grime from nearby Blastburn. Something has to give and for Lucas and others they find it is a case of out of the frying pan, only to find themselves, almost literally, in the fire.