At the height of her powers, there's no-one to match Aiken for the verve and ingenuity of her stories, and for heroines, there's precious few to match the inimitable Dido Twite. Returned at last from her voyaging, Did quickly becomes ensnared in another Hanoverian plot to do something utterly mad at the coronation ceremony of the new king. Witches and smugglers and lost twins and scheming cousins and cheerful smugglers and sinister puppet shows are all elements of this rollicking tale. Fantastic.

An amazing dream of a book that unfolds with surreal logic as cats talk, witches fly, foxes plot against gamekeepers, model ships sail away with a water-rat captains and a hundred other odd and wonderful things, while Kay tries to discover the fate of his great-grandfather's lost treasure. The voices and the language are as magical as the various miraculous and mysterious occurrences. It utterly refuses to make any sense of things or offer explanations or justifications. It's pretty much its own justification, that's what.

This book explodes like a firework in the brain, or perhaps like one of the thirteen volcanoes that encircle the misappropriated lake of the title. The ideas, the plot, the situations go beyond the merely outrageous and into the sublimely wonderful. This is a masterpiece of children's fantasy, and Dido Twite must surely be one of the great heroines of children's literature.

Dido is travelling back to England on the Naval steamer The Thrush, which is diverted to South America, or, as it is known in this alternative universe, Roman America, by the Admiralty, to the country of New Cumbria, established centuries before when the Romans and the British fled Saxon invaders, crossed the Atlantic and found the New World. Yes. All is not well, however, and as Dido and her companions traverse rivers and jungles and mountains to answer the summons of the Queen, they dodge kidnappers and ferocious beasts and encounter plots and mysteries by the score. Missing children, sinister dressmakers, giant flying birds, horrible hunts, steam-powered revolving silver castles and, yes, a stolen lake, whose provenance must be one of the wildest, maddest, most original ideas I've encountered in ages. Aiken's measured style keeps things anchored, as does the incomparable Miss Twite, her good-natured, big-hearted, curious, stubborn, loyal, common-as-muck and ferociously intelligent protagonist, who speaks fluent street-cant as though it were lyric poetry, and whose common sense and indefatigable moral compass keeps the whole fabulous contraption firmly on the ground.

I honestly think this is the most purely enjoyable thing I've read in ages, of any genre, for any age-group, and I've read some pretty enjoyable stuff lately. I will definitely and absolutely be reading more of this series.

I decided to revisit this book, the perfect book for Christmas. There are few that can match it for sheer atmosphere, whether it's the warmth of Will's big, boisterous family, or the strange, timeless, slightly formal ceremonies and rites of the Old Ones, resonant with history and folklore and the odd sadness that comes with Will gaining ancient knowledge and power but in some sense losing his childhood. Then there's the awesome chill of the Dark, the heavy falls of snow, the sinister Rider and the tragic Walker and the sly witch-girl, the siege in the manor house as the cold closes in, and, of course, the final ride and chase and wild hunt through the forests of Windsor and the skies of Twelfth Night as the rain dissolves the heaped banks of snow and the floods course over the frozen ground.

Perhaps Will is led through the plot to find the various Signs a bit too much by the hand or the nose. Perhaps he's a bit too passive and accepting, but there's something to be said for that, for a younger reader. Sometimes you want to be guided, shown the right way to pierce the mysteries and find the objects and become something more. It's a kind of comfort, and not one to be sneezed at at Christmas.

Fun book. Horrible couple of days, so I don't feel like giving it a proper review. But it was a nice little escape from a lot of grimness and strain.

I always preferred this ever so slightly to Weirdstone, and one of the reasons may be that Colin and Susan have a little more agency in this book, while at the same time having less. More stuff happens to them directly and they do things and even have opinions, but they remain, sadly, ciphers, albeit ciphers on the cusp of change. More than that, though, it was the idea of wild magic, magic that exists purely for its own sake, savage and emotional and dangerous, set against the more ordered, courtly magic of Cadellin, which anticipates a lot of modern fantasy magic with rules and systems, but of course, it is the wild magic that breaks Susan's heart at the end, and leaves the reader haunted too.
Gomrath is a wilder, more formless book as opposed to the rather tidy chase narrative of Weirdstone. The magic comes out of the very landscape, and the danger from the shadowy Brollachain and the shape-changing Morrigan while Colin and Susan's relationship with their allies is more uneasy, and strained to the point of bitterness with the lios-alfar. Futhermore, much is left unsettled at the end, unless I missed some details, with the Morrigan still on the loose and whatever was bothering the lios-alfar unresolved. In retrospect, the set-up for a third volume was always there, but Garner resisted or refused, and many years later we got Boneland, something of an entirely different order.

I love the Edward Gorey cover. Aiken and Gorey go together perfectly well. Aiken and Gorey sounds like the name of some sort of weird and gothic medical drama, sort of like House, if House investigated talking warts and haemogoblins and phantom limbs where you have an extra pair of hands doing unimaginable things you can feel but not see.

Is, half-sister of Dido, embarks on an adventure all her own, a particularly dark one as the children of London have been lured to the new kingdom set up in the north of England where they are enslaved and forced to work in mines and foundries, dying, as the book makes clear, at an appalling rate. True to form, the arch-villain turns out to be another Twite, Is' uncle, Roy, who has set himself up as king of an industrial underground nation, busily building up his army so he he can march south and gain more.

A lot of this seems oddly archaic nowadays. The heroine is small of stature, barely educated, but smart, indomitable and fundamentally decent - so she doesn't go around kung fu-ing bad guys and dispensing rough justice. There are also quite a few coincidences in the book forwarding the plot, which wouldn't be tolerated in a modern, tightly plotted, everything-must-have-a-reason novel. Aiken is less concerned in the versimilitude of her plot mechanics than in just getting on with the story, and who is to say she's wrong? I noted the coincidences and then moved on because I cared more about the story than the plot, too.

I really enjoyed Is, and I know there's another Is book before getting back to Dido and Simon, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Aiken and Gorey. For when your medical problems got problems. Peculiar problems.

This is certainly the strongest book of the three, although part of that is it paying off all sorts of karmic debt built up over the previous two books. Twig suffered enormously, lurching haplessly from adventure to adventure, most of them horrendous and horrible, then when finally things seem to go his way, he contributes, unwittingly, to disaster and the loss or death of most of the existing supporting cast. No sooner is book three underway than it all goes horribly wrong again, but this time Twig has experience, determination, agency! Off he goes heedless of the odds or the impossibility of the task to recover his scattered crew and restore his lost memory and save the world! It's all quite thrilling, while the trademark horrors and nastiness are all present and correct, this time we have a protagonist equipped to cope with them and maybe even triumph. He's even got a sidekick as callow and green as he once was and through whose eyes we see most of the action. The mild distancing effect does wonders for Twig's personality: characters on the Edge are boldly drawn but they're not exactly complex or popping off the page.

I enjoyed it very much, all told, but I was slightly put out by the female characters, of which there are few. Sympathetic female characters do exist, but they are scarce, only one rises to the height of an actual supporting character. Two female-dominated species are, er, hair raising in their depiction of femininity, though of course most of the species on the Edge have hair-raising aspects. Still: Shrikes and Termagents? Really?

I do not, oddly enough, expect things to improve noticeably in future volumes, but hopefully it won't detract from my enjoyment.

A boy with Asperger's sets out to find who killed a neighbour's dog and introduces us to a point of view where all the things we take completely for granted make absolutely no sense and every day is a struggle to cope with incomprehensible cues, inputs and behaviours while maintaining control over the self and the self's environment, in the process deconstructing and exploding (diagrammatically) our own entrenched sense of normal perception and modes of thought and patterns of behaviour. It's not really a murder mystery, because you'll guess who dunnit, and they confess before the halfway point, but what happens next is that a boy who is utterly dependant on trust and routine and familiar surroundings and people has his world betrayed and pulled out from under him. His vulnerability and bravery are painful, his inability to cope or comprehend with the pain of his broken family is heartbreaking.

Superb children's fantasy that I am delighted to discover stands up perfectly well. This series was one of the cornerstones of my childhood reading - well, early to mid-teens at any rate. The tale of Taran, Assistant Pig Keeper and his heroic companions is thrilling, classic, warm, funny, scary stuff. There is brilliant use of Welsh mythology and fantastic writing and wonderful characters who grow and change through the series, though none more so than Taran himself, who starts out with dreams of adventure and glory, only to find actual adventuring difficult and muddled and full of mistakes and terrors. I identified absolutely with Taran, which made his growth to maturity in later volumes all the more powerful.