Bogwoppit (A Puffin Book)

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I'm glad Puffin republished these lesser known children's stories, and with wonderful covers which is always a good thing. She discovers they were thought to be extinct, and is deeply horrified when her aunt, who considers them pests, kills all of them with poison. Their relationship gets off to a shaky start, made all the more precarious by the unexpected appearance in the kitchen of a curious wide-eyed creature with a long furry tale, feathered wings and two webbed feet.

however, Aunt Lily and Samantha have never really got on, and Samantha does not feel wanted or loved. It used to make me think amazing things can happen to anyone, which is always the best kind of children’s book. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. My pick for the book I would take from my childhood favourites to read and reread on a desert island for June was Bogwoppit by Ursula Moray Williams. Luckily, Samantha discovers a furry, blue-eyed creature living in the cellar: a bogwoppit, once believed to be extinct.Orphan Samantha is sent to live with her aunt, Lady Clandorris, who lives in a thoroughly dilapidated mansion mirroring her own unloved and gloomy life.

But found, as ever with Williams' books, that the books have an old-fashionedness of the very worst kind, the casual disrespect for anyone who is not English speaking, white, middle class kind. It is about an orphan girl whose guardian aunt was done with her and told her to go live with her antisocial aunt. These drawings are not cutesy, but the pictures of Samantha are excellent and portray the complex person in the story very well indeed. When Aunt Lily marries the lodger and goes to America, orphaned Samantha is packed off to her Aunt Daisy, who lives in a grand house at the Park. The way the relationship develops between these two spiky and independent characters, who we can see are lonely and actually need each other, is fun to read and I think all children secretly dream of being able to speak to adults the way Samantha does and getting away with it!She certainly is not wanted when her aunt gets married and wants to move to America, so she gets palmed off on yet another aunt, who wants her even less. He was quite prepared to believe that the Bogwoppit existed, but not that people behaved as they did throughout the book. I have been looking for this book for years because I LOVED it as a child, but it's always out of print. I think this is the genius of the writing, how the author manages to create a strong personality in a creature that has no language to communicate. Many people will know Ursula Moray Williams for her more famous books, Gobbolino the Witch’s Catand The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, both of which I loved, but my favourite of her books was always Bogwoppit.

Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, written while expecting her first child, remained in print throughout her life from its publication in 1939. Good reading from Bond, and plenty of creative sounds and effects to represent the Bogwoppit itself, and good distinction between characters.It is, she discovers, a bogwoppit, an animal assumed extinct, and one of many that come up through the drains from the outside pond. I’d like to be able to describe them to you, but they aren’t really like anything you’ll every have seen and you need to read the book to understand them. En masse, they are quite annoying, but The-One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World is different and becomes the star of the show. I love it just as much today as I did back then, and I think it’s a brilliantly constructed, cleverly written and humorous story that will appeal to any generation. After her husband's death in 1974, Ursula Moray Williams remained active, writing, gardening, giving talks and visiting her family in various parts of the world.

The story is interesting, I remember being gripped by it as a kid, and with a group of my friends, because it has more tragedy in it than most books for kids that age, and yet it's fun, quirky, and has so many things in it that you want in a story at that age. I won't change my rating since it's based on how much I loved it as a child, but it took me more than half the book to figure out what it was that I saw in it when I read it over 20 years ago. Ursula Moray Williams was born on 19 April 1911 at Petersfield, Hampshire, ten minutes after her twin sister, Barbara. It immediately sold out but disappeared until re-issued in abridged form by Kaye Webb at Puffin Books twenty years later, when it became a best-seller. We are not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other Web sites or media without our permission.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The book suffers from what most of the other reviewers have said - they (like me) read it when they were young and assumed their kids would like it too now.