I would recommend this without batting an eyelid because it is good, powerful, bold fiction. The author of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase presents a darkly humorous adventure. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Read Midnight Is a Place by Joan Aiken available from Rakuten Kobo. I can recognise the mark of an author who is fine, fine, fine with her craft and I can understand how important this might be to somebody just discovering what language is and what it can be shaped to be. Midnight is a Place - Kindle edition by Aiken, Joan. I can not be wholly comfortable with something, but I can recognise how great it is. And again this is a testament to how good she is: there’s so much here, whether it’s the nuanced, subtle details of character, or the barely managed wilderness of the landscape, or it’s simply those hogs that roam the sewers that thread like an artery underneath the world.īut here’s the thing: sometimes it doesn’t matter how I feel about a book. There’s so much packed in this novel – family history, dramatic personal change, hogs! in! sewers! – that I ache for time to explore it, to discover more about this and that before being pulled away to study the other. I am a little cowed by that, I think, and it’s hard for me to find my place in the text.Īnd yet Midnight Is A Place is outstanding fierce, rich, full of detail, but it’s a detail that I chase after and never quite get hold of. A world remade and reshaped by somebody who is undoubtedly brilliant. Everything feels right and then, suddenly, off. This is no criticism it’s a testament to her wild imagination and fiercely convincing world-building. MIDNIGHT IS A PLACE by Joan Aiken RELEASE DATE: ApDickens would enjoy this book, and so will Aiken fans who have been waiting for a full-scale 19th century novel ever since The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its successors.

But I think with Joan Aiken, I’m always struggling to understand, trying to figure out what’s going on and where it is, and how I should feel about that. I like being able to handle them and know what I’m going to get and then being delighted in how my expectations are subverted. I think, sometimes, some of it stems from my preferences I like stories with a particular taste and style and frame. I’ve never wholly clicked with Joan Aiken.

Midnight is a place joan aiken