Jane-Emily and Witches' Children

Just wanted to let everyone know we heard you loud and clear, and we're reissuing, thanks to Patricia Clapp's granddaughter, who posted below! The book will be available from Harper Paperbacks in Summer 2007.

I too read this back in the 70s, and adored that little chill, the thrill of the suspense and the scare. I do wish they would reissue for this generation of readers. I can't think of anything current that has the same feel. There's none of the gore of modern horror, just the scare of the inexplicable, the unknown, and the eerie. I'd snap it up for my younger relatives in a heartbeat if it were available.

Hi Sonja... Patricia Clapp was my grandmother. I was very young when "Jane-Emily" was published, and although I tried to read it then, it scared the daylights out of me. To this day, it is the one book she wrote which I can't get through. My oldest daughter, now 15, has read Jane-Emily a bunch of times and loves it. My grandmother died two years ago. I'm sure she would have loved knowing how her words touched your life. Jen

I am so delighted to see that other people have the same kind of memories about this book that I do. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why this book struck such a chord with me--but it did. I've reread this book as an adult, and I think one thing that made this book such a compelling read is that it is about a nine-year-old girl, but it is written from the point of view of an eighteen-year-old girl. This perspective allows the pre-adolescent reader for whom the book is intended to identify with the emotions and issues facing both children and young adults. After all, don't most twelve-year-olds feel like a child one moment, and then nearly grown up the next? Also, Jane-Emily deals with an astounding number of issues in more depth than you'd think possible in such a short book: death, fear of abandonment, romantic love, love between parent and child, friendship, and the classic battle between good and evil. I wouldn't argue that Jane-Emily is the best-written book for children I've ever come across. (It's good, not great, in that regard.) But for pre and early adolescent girls, this book is just a dead-on perfect hit. It really is magic.

It's a shame this book is nowhere to be found. I checked Jane-Emily out of the library every weekend my entire third-grade year. For fifteen years, it's blend of romance, psychological drama, gothic suspense and unforgettable characters has remained in my subconscious. Without giving the plot away, I must say that there are pieces of the book that are still so vivid to me -- the forbidding house, the giant glass ball in the yard, Emily locking herself in her bedroom. Jane-Emily is remarkably mature for a YA novel; many of the themes and situations are ones present in adult fiction of this genre (reincarnation, ghosts, a haunted house, mysterious death), and it borrows a lot of it's gracefully dark, ominous style from Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson. I would love to read Jane-Emily as an adult -- it would be like stepping back into a relentlessly haunting memory. WHERE IS THIS BOOK?