A Necklace of Raindrops and Other Stories
by Joan Aiken
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These eight stories, most of which include a bit of magic, include tales of a wishing mat, an enormous cat, and a very strange house.Tags
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A 1001 CBYMRBYGU. When I picked up my copy of this book from the library, I was initially very disappointed to find that it was a collection of short stories. Then I started the book. Mercy. It was fantastic. Literally and metaphorically. Wonderfully written fantasies. There is one story about a man who saves the North Wind, who then rewards the man with a gift of a necklace of raindrops. Another is the tale of an old woman who accidentally baked a bit of sky in her pie. Yet another tells of three men who work in a train station where no trains ever stop. Fantastic.
“You may think it odd that there were three men to look after one tiny station, but the people who ran the railway knew that if you left two men together in a lonely place show more they would quarrel, but if you left three men, two of them could always grumble to each other about the third, and then they would be quite happy.” show less
“You may think it odd that there were three men to look after one tiny station, but the people who ran the railway knew that if you left two men together in a lonely place show more they would quarrel, but if you left three men, two of them could always grumble to each other about the third, and then they would be quite happy.” show less
Here are eight gloriously imaginative stories for eight satisfying sessions of bedtime reading. There’s a flying apple pie, a cat that’s bigger than an elephant, a house that lays an egg, storybook animals that leap out of their books at night, and a wealth of other wonderful characters and ideas, all with the colorful, dreamlike quality of the very best fairy tales. Joan Aiken’s delicious prose is a joy to read aloud to very young listeners yet simple enough for the independent reader to savor on his or her own. Kevin Hawkes’s illustrations–nearly 60 of them–capture with great flair and fun the magical adventures and the triumph of the good over the bad.
More like folktale retellings (though these are not based on actual folktales) and far less edgy that Aiken's other work, this collection shows off the grace of her language and fertility of her imagination. Reading audience: pre-tweens.
Beautiful, funny, entertaining fairy tales. And i really liked the illustrations by Pienkowski.
I must be more careful about which books I pass on. I want to read and reread all of Aiken's short stories, and they're hard to find.
Gentle, magical and utterly delightful!
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Author Information
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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
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Awards and Honors
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
El Barco de Vapor [España, años 80] (55 (A))
Work Relationships
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- A Necklace of Raindrops and Other Stories
- Original publication date
- 1968
- Dedication
- For Jeremy and Marianne
- First words
- A man called Mr Jones and his wife lived near the sea.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And what wonderful dreams he had that night, and every night after, while his granny sat in front of the big fire, with six camels on either side of her.
- Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- Children's Books, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 823.914 — Literature & rhetoric English & Old English literatures English fiction 1900- 1901-1999 1945-1999
- LCC
- PZ7 .A2695 .N — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Juvenile belles lettres
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 427
- Popularity
- 72,531
- Reviews
- 7
- Rating
- (4.14)
- Languages
- Catalan, English, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 23
- ASINs
- 13
