Oh, you naughty, naughty, precious children!

When she was back in Illinois for a visit earlier this month, my youngest sister, who has been working in Philadelphia public schools as part of City Year, brought me a copy of a book she thought I’d like. And was she ever right. This particular copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken) is a hardback from the early sixties with a bitchin’ cover by Edward Gorey that the school library, revamping their holdings, had stamped DISCARD and was going to throw away before Megan rescued it. It even has the little slip in back stamped by the librarian and signed by the lendee, including the kid who checked it out last on February 25, 1972 (a Daniel Gormley of Rm 108).

I offer that it is a fantastic book to read any time at any age, but think it would be an especially good February book, as so much of the action takes place on the desolate, windswept English moors beneath layers and layers of snow: “It was dusk—winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.” That’s how it starts, with a passage that Laura Lippman rightly describes as “the YA version of James Joyce’s The Dead.”

Populated with characters with Dickensian names that allude to their personalities like the evil governess Miss Slighcarp, the stingy boarding school owner Mrs. Brisket, and the grifter Mr. Grimshaw, and strewn with such words as posset, ormolu, metheglin, wold and remonstrate, many of which I had to look up (there’s a good recipe for posset, for example, here), this book is full of writing that empowers girls without being all self-conscious or PC about it. It also has secret passages, oubliettes, impossible journeys and a goose boy with the heart of an artist.

A lot of kids’ books and movies that I didn’t actually get around to reading or watching as a kid, I come to as an adult and am completely underwhelmed by (The Dark Crystal is a key and very obnoxious instance of this phenomenon). But other books for kids that I read as an adult make me think that I’m probably able to enjoy them even more because I’m not a kid (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is an instance of this phenomenon). Do you have any books that strike you this way? What are your favorite kids’ books that you read as an actual kid? What are your favorite kids’ books you’ve read as an adult? What makes these books lose their luster or stand the tests of age and time? And have any of you guys read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase? Because OMG, you should stick it on your Goodreads and totally read it.