I'll be doing a post soon on great books about writing and illustrating for children. One that I love and am only three pages through is Joan Aiken's The Way to Write for Children. I'm only three pages through (for the past five years) because after reading one page I have to go lie down. Joan packs a big wallop of information on every page and makes me think writing for children is the most important job in the fine arts world. I assumed Ms Aiken's books were fabulous though my only contact with her writing was this how to write book.

So when I heard my amazingly talented friend comparing The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to the Lemony Snicket books as if Mr Snicket had ripped Ms Aiken off I wanted to see this for myself.

Maybe I'm a dodo, but personally Daniel Handler's books contain their own brand of melodrama different from Joan Aiken's. Though he is following in her genre footsteps of wonderful Victorian cliches, Joan Aiken's Wolves was great great fun quite different from the fun of Lemony Snicket.

The beginning is smashing, there are REAL WOLVES. Huge packs of them. And they are just AROUND. God help me, but Joan makes it seem so believable that I really am afraid of roving teams of wolves following trains to train stations and launching themselves at sleeping passengers in their cars. The Wolves of WIlloughby Chase is very satisfying--the beginning instills a proper amount of terror in your heart to fear for our two young main characters and there are a few scenes (ice skating on a frozen river to spy on a suspicious person as it gets dark and hearing a howl) that are amazing scenes of tension. I wanted to rip the pages up to find a way to read faster and found myself yet again reading it before bed and then again at six in the morning to find out what had happened while I slept.

Even though I knew there'd be a happy ending I wasn't entirely sure. That had me reading to the end. Surely those that love Lemony Snicket or a dark Anne of Green Gables even will enjoy this. I'm excited to find the sequel, also with a lovely Edward Gorey cover, and see what happens next.

Jaime