THE SERIAL GARDEN

Gathered under one cover from several Aiken collections, the magical, eccentric and very British Armitage family reappears in a collection of 24 stories, four never before published. The Armitages’ wacky magic (usually a Monday occurrence) and that of their fantastical town, a place filled with witches and magical beings, rises from the pages when matters go slightly awry, in the manner of Edward Eager and E. Nesbit. Aiken respected her readers and used exact and sometimes challenging language in her inventively plotted tales; even sophisticated readers may need a dictionary at hand. Although the brief episodes, like the family that inhabits them, are far from ordinary, they can be introduced to a new generation of young people by reading the stories to a group and easing children into them slowly. Readers searching for magical chapters and those who have read the author’s novels should enjoy these tales. (Short stories. 10-14)