Alas and alack, if Midwinter Nightingale felt underdeveloped, this is sadly undercooked, almost a short story. Nonetheless, Aiken's wit and invention are present on almost every page, just not the energy and not the proper momentum that a book featuring plots about Dido's search for a new heir to the throne and Simon marching to war should have. The conclusion is rushed, but nothing is really left hanging and there are some fine jokes, and the letters from the witch are worth reading all on their own. Maybe only completists will make it this far, and maybe they'll be sad, but hopefully they'll be satisfied, too.
I have mixed feelings about this book. Read as a standalone, it's a little charming book; but considering it's the last book of the Wolves of Willoughby Chase chronicle, it feels like it's lost most of the energy that has driven the rest of the sequence. Well, Joan Aiken has reached a very considerable age at the time she wrote this book (she died in 2004, aged 79), so maybe it has to do something with the book being thin and feeling like a hasty conclusion for Wolves. Wolves could have ended ra
Do You like book The Witch Of Clatteringshaws (2015)?
Joan Aiken is a master at walking the knife edge between comedy and tragedy. I often find myself laughing one minute and then gasping and crying the next when reading her work. This book and the one that precedes it in the series (Midwinter Nightingale) are interesting in that they seem to split the comedy and tragedy, so that Midwinter Nightingale is all tragedy, and The Witch of Clatteringshaws is all comedy. Together, they make for a poignant and hilarious end of the series (the Wolves of Willoughby Chase books).
—Meredith
