Bogwoppit (A Puffin Book)

Product Information

however, Aunt Lily and Samantha have never really got on, and Samantha does not feel wanted or loved.

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. We are not responsible for the republishing of the content found on this blog on other Web sites or media without our permission. 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. As well as writing, she became involved in local life around the village of Beckford, where she and her family lived, organizing children's parties, and serving as a magistrate. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.In the cellar of Park House, the old mansion where orphaned Samantha has been sent to stay with her disagreeable aunt Daisy, there are hundreds of bogwoppits - believed extinct, up till now. The appeal of this book is the humour and the sheer level of imagination that has gone into the story.

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. It is about an orphan girl whose guardian aunt was done with her and told her to go live with her antisocial aunt. 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. With a new foreword and the original drawings by Shirley Hughes, it’s a great pleasure to see this title by a gifted storyteller back in print. You didnt have to make excuses for her or pity her like other unwanted children in other stories of this type.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. 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! 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.

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. 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. These drawings are not cutesy, but the pictures of Samantha are excellent and portray the complex person in the story very well indeed.

En masse, they are quite annoying, but The-One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World is different and becomes the star of the show. The last thing she wants is the responsibility of her brash niece, but Samantha isn’t taking no for an answer, and they are going to have to learn how to rub along together. I'm glad Puffin republished these lesser known children's stories, and with wonderful covers which is always a good thing.

Aunt Daisy wants to get rid of them all, but Samantha grows very fond of one and can't bear to part with him. 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.

Good reading from Bond, and plenty of creative sounds and effects to represent the Bogwoppit itself, and good distinction between characters.