Voices
by Joan Aiken
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In the 1930's eleven-year-old Julia goes to spend the summer with her playwright father and finds that he has abandoned her to the care of her pre-occupied stepmother who seems unaware of the strange voices that haunt Julia every night.Tags
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by bookel
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Another moody ghost story from Aiken, this time set in the late 1930s, Return to Harken House follows the story of eleven-year-old Julia, who is sent to stay with her father for the summer. Mostly left to herself, Julia is horrified when she begins to hear voices. Is she going mad, or do the unusual occurrences have anything to do with Joshua Harkin, the 17th-century mathematician and alchemist who once owned Harken House...?
An entertaining read, especially for intermediate readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his show more web out over Europe.
Note: this title was originally published in the UK as Voices show less
An entertaining read, especially for intermediate readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his show more web out over Europe.
Note: this title was originally published in the UK as Voices show less
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Author Information
215+ Works 19,779 Members
Joan Delano Aiken was born in Rye, Sussex, England, on September 4, 1924, the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize winner, writer Conrad Aiken. She was raised in a rural area and home schooled by her mother until the age 12. She then attended Wychwood School, a boarding school in Oxford. Her work first appeared in 1941 when the British Broadcasting show more Corporation, where she worked as a librarian, broadcast some of her short stories on their Children's Hour program. Aiken also worked at St. Thomas's Hospital, and in 1943 she moved to the reference department of the London office of the United Nations, where she collected information about resistance movements. She worked for the UN until 1949, all the while continuing to write stories. In 1953 a collection of short fiction called All You've Ever Wanted and Other Stories was published. While writing The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, begun in 1952, her husband became ill and died of lung cancer in 1955. After working for five years as a copy editor at Argosy Magazine, and at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Firm, she returned and finished the book in 1963. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and was made into a successful film in 1988. In 1969 The Whispering Mountain won the Guardian Children's Book Award, and in 1972, Night Fall won America's Edgar Allen Poe Award for juvenile mystery. Aiken is best known for her adult "fantasy" stories. She has received awards for children's fiction and for mystery fiction, and has also written ''sequels'' to Jane Austen books. She collaborated with her daughter to write many episodes of her Arabel and Mortimer the raven series for the BBC. In all, Aiken wrote 92 novels - including 27 for adults - as well as plays, poems and short stories, although she was best known as a writer of children's stories. Joan Aiken died in January of 2004 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Hauntings (Book 3)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Voices
- Original title
- Voices
- Alternate titles
- Return to Harken House: A Ghost Story
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 33
- Popularity
- 854,828
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.17)
- Languages
- English, Finnish, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook
- ISBNs
- 7
