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Return to Harken House
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by Joan Aiken
Sales Rank : 2493127
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Reading level: Young Adult
Hardcover: 118 pages
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers January 1, 1990
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385299753
ISBN-13: 978-0385299756
From Publishers Weekly
When Julia arrives at Harken House to spend the summer with her father and his second wife, Trudl, she finds that her father is in Lucerne supervising the production of one of his plays, and Trudl, though reasonably hospitable, is preoccupied with her own concerns. It is a lonely time for Julia, punctuated with episodes of what seems to be supernatural possession. She has several bouts of sleepwalking and, more disturbing still, finds that her body has become a sort of microphone through which strange voices shout angry messages. Is Julia haunted by the house's famous ghosts, or is she suffering from a combination of loneliness and a steady diet of 19th-century horror novels? Although Aiken's book never directly answers these questions, its resolution is satisfying nevertheless. When reduced to its essence, Julia's story may not be so very different from that of Aiken's Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, that makes this novel so compelling. Ages 10-14.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 4-6-- To prepare her for the experience of boarding school, 11-year-old Julia is sent by her mother to spend a summer with her playwright father and her stepmother, Trudl, an Austrian refugee. It is England in the 1930s, and Hitler is already "creeping across Europe . . . snatching country after country." Arriving at Harken House, Julia finds that her father is on the continent overseeing the production of one of his plays, and Trudl, although briskly hospitable, is busy with her own concerns. Julia settles down, uneasily, in the house in which she was born, and which is believed by the locals to be haunted by the spirit of a 17th-century alchemist, Joshua Harkin. In short order, Julia is possessed and begins having prophetic dreams, sleepwalking, and speaking in the voices of Joshua and his estranged daughter. When she also begins speaking in the voices of her absent father and stepmother Trudl, readers realize that their relationship, too, is in the process of dissolution. Julia's only refuge is reading--but what reading-- Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm, Doctor Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi! It is the spirit and tone of those works--and not of Aiken's own earlier classics such as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1987) or Nightbirds on Nantucket (1981, both Dell) -- that inform the narrative voice of this somber book. Ineluctably literary in its use of symbol and allusion, the book is also positively relentless in imposing its themes of possession and redemption on a very slender plot. Unfortunately, neither of these themes is satisfactorily resolved--at least in dramatic terms--for the plot simply peters out. --Michael Cart, Beverly Hills Public Library
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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