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Product Description
Anything is magically possible in these twelve short stories by gifted storyteller, Joan Aiken. Imagine ordering a sunny day from the local weather witch, asking an appletree to answer the telephone and making a beautiful garden out of old cereal boxes. What would you do if you inherited a real hair loom, or found three ugly old ladies and a dragon on your doorstep and would you need a bicycle if you had a unicorn to ride?
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great collection of stories with great appeal,
By A Customer
This review is from: Collins Modern Classics - A Small Pinch of Weather (Paperback)
This is a magical and enchanting collection of 12 stories by the well renowned Joan Aiken. The stories have a wide ranging appeal and are full of magic and mystery. It is a great collection which can be read by the more confident reader alone, who will be able to read several stories at a time, but is also suitable for those with less confidence, as the stories are of a manageable length. These stories will hold any reader's imagination long enough for them to want to finish each story. The title story 'A Small Pinch of Weather' tells of the weather woman and how she can decide what the weather will be and helps out the people of the her small Scottish town by adjusting the weather accordingly! And of how she is rescued by the Bishop despite the differences he may have with her cat. It is just one of many great stories in this book which will keep any reader entertained.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clever and comforting,
By
This review is from: Collins Modern Classics - A Small Pinch of Weather (Paperback)
You can tell from these that Aiken is no Joani-come-lately with regards to enchantment, rich and buttery prose, and the sheer old-fashioned pleasure of storytelling. But Aiken wrote many books of original short stories - among them, many ghost stories I'm not familiar with at all - and A Small Pinch of Weather is one of a series of these.
Few of these stories are of that crude trend of equipping witches with vacuum cleaners. The Cost of Dark - where a foolish king gambles away all the dark from his side of the world to a crafty enchanter, and his daughter must gallops to the brink of death to win some back - could pass for a tidied up bit of Grimm or Andersen. Along with some of the other stories in this book, its modern qualities are subtle - the artful shaping of a metaphor, or an enlightened attitude to gender (as in The Boy Who Read Aloud) - but generally I can't get too worked up about these stories. The energy of a fairy tale, for me, comes out of its rawness, its seriousness, its sadness. The Cost of Dark will never be as worth my time as The Goose Girl , with its curious brutality. Most of Aiken's stories do, in fact, trespass on the twee - but in her more unusual stories (the greater majority of the book) her prose is fantastically nimble and breathlessly witty. She has a subtle and instinctive knowledge, possibly inherited from her father, Conrad Aiken, for the rhythm and music of a voice. It happens in the narrator's voices and the voices of characters, and in those rhythms the fantastic becomes surreal, uncanny, comic. The absolute best, genuinely funniest of the stories are those about the Armitage family - I hadn't realised, before reading this, that such a series existed - and these have something of the character of Tove Jansson's Moomin stories, along with the mannered yet manic tone of E. Nesbitt's short stories, her stories' most obvious heirs. In these, Mark and Harriet are more than at home with magical beings - they have a pet unicorn, and Home Economics classes are liable to concern prussic acid and love potions - but remain difficult to really impress, and capable of dealing with anything. Perhaps they're like the children of the early seventies, blithely inhabiting a world of technology that is wonderful and disconcerting to their parents - or just any reader of fantasy, who will take a flying carpet in their stride, and need it to be woven out of the beard of a mischievous druid for it really to register. And in these stories, there is a wonderful physicality to the magical beings and happenings - the phone you might use to ring up and speak to the trees in the orchard stands with a little portico over it, in case of rain - the moon, if you shoot it out of the sky, is like a silver penny the size of a nursery table - and this reaches a crescendo in The Serial Garden, a wonderful swirling together of love story, ghost story, and magic realism, the story of an enchanted cereal packet.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing, Marvellous!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Collins Modern Classics - A Small Pinch of Weather (Paperback)
All 12 stories in this book are great. I like "The Serial Garden" the best. It's about Mark Armitage, (appeared in several stories) who like to collect garden paper-cut from Brekkfast Brikks cereal. It has a poem, which become a sort of spell, that make the magical garden real...
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