Read the Original Review of Joan Aiken’s ‘Masterpiece’ The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

More difficult is the yearly search for new fiction fit to place on the juvenile bookshelf alongside the likes of Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand and Grahame’s Wind in the Willows. In recent years the only vaguely acceptable candidate was Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth (1961). But this year can boast one genuine small masterpiece. It is called The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Doubleday; $2.95). Written, as any child’s book should be, with obvious fond delight by Poet Conrad Aiken’s daughter Joan, the book tells about two very small girls in a very big English country house almost entirely surrounded by dangers.

…”Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold,” Miss Aiken begins. “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.”

Besides those wolves, the book’s two young heroines come with a complete set of Victorian manners: one of them almost starves to death in a train compartment because her Aunt Jane has told her never to eat in the presence of strangers. Recounting their gothic torments at the hands of a cruel governess called Miss Slighcarp and a harpy schoolmistress named Mrs. Brisket, the author sometimes pirouettes on the filigreed edge of outrageous literary parody without ever undermining the suspense of a story suitable for anyone from seven to 70. Wolves, in fact, is almost a copybook lesson in those virtues that a classic children’s book must possess; charm, a style of its own, the skill and authority to create a small world without writing down to small readers.