Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken

 




 I'm on record as saying that I don't like children's literature. This is not because there is anything wrong with children's literature, but I'm not a child, and neither am I a "kidult" (I thought Will Self had coined that, but apparently it's much older) who revels in the books and media he or she enjoyed or would have enjoyed as a child. I've never read Harry Potter, and probably never will.

And yet, here I am writing about a children's book that I enjoyed. I enjoyed the first in the series The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, more, but that's by way of saying that this is not even the first children's book I've read in recent years. I moved on to the second book in the series because I had enjoyed the first a great deal. What both books share is a clever plot, elegant writing, and rollicking humor. 

 The thing that makes it possible for even as curmudgeonly a reader as me to enjoy these novels is that Aiken does not assume that children are idiots. For example, she uses words that sent me to the dictionary. This, I think, is unusual in the children's literature of our time. Once upon a time I compared a paragraph or two from Tarzan of the Apes, once considered a "young adult" (whatever that means) novel with another "young adult" offering, The Hunger Games. The assumption guiding the prose in the latter seemed to be that "young adults" read at about a fourth-grade level. 

The presiding genius in Aiken's books is Dickens, so there is no such pandering. Like Dickens, Aiken is not afraid to put her tremendous word hoard to use, to tangle the threads of her plot into intricate patterns, and to make us laugh with and at characters that are, as is perhaps typical in children's books, slightly cardboard, but engaging nevertheless.

Don't be surprised if I go on to read book three in the series.

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