Midnight Is a Place

Midnight is a Place is a charming book. It takes you back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, inside dirty mills where child labor is common, down dark back streets in poor neighborhoods and elsewhere. The characters are worth caring about and each chapter leaves you wondering what will happen next to our hero and heroine. It's got lively action, and an interesting plot. Good Read for all.

I think that Midnight is a Place is the best of Joan Aiken's. It is more suspensful than the others, and at the end of every chapter your always wondering what's going to happpen next. Also, the story is very origional. Joan Aikens writing is so good that you feel like you are actually there!

Midnight is a Place a dark story that really draws you into its world. This book has so much depth and imagination without being a to childlike and foolish. A great story, different from others out there

It's got all the ingredients of a classic Gothic thriller (the creepy mansion, the unpleasant guardian, the servant with a hidden past, the lonely orphan, the depressing, filthy, poverty-stricken town, the sudden reversals of fortune, the mysterious benefactor) but MIDNIGHT IS A PLACE is written for that twilight area in the great scheme of publishing demographics--somewhere between middle school and adult, somewhere past chapter books but not quite ready for Great Literature. And in Aiken's expert hands, this is a wonderful place to explore. Lucas Bell, the lonely orphan with the unpleasant guardian, lives in the frightening mansion called Midnight Court, is taught by the servant with the hidden past, is subjected to the sudden reversals of fortune, including the unexpected arrival of another orphan (Anne-Marie, a plucky young French girl), a devastating fire, the need to find work in the local factory, the help of a secretive old lady, and the long unraveling of the mystery of his name and fortune. It's glorious stuff, over-the-top, a wonderful read, moody and frightening and funny by turns, managing both to exploit the genre and to rise above it. Young readers who have enjoyed the Lemony Snicket books, and who are now ready for something better, something real, something that's sort of a complex three-way cross between Dickens, Austen, and old-fashioned Gothic romances, will enjoy this book. It'd be a quick read for adults, but I'd recommend it to anyone who loves the genre.

Joan Aiken sets many of her children's books in a slightly off-kilter Victorian world, and this is one of them. Lucas and Anna-Marie are orphans in the care of a miserly, grim old man who owns carpet-making factories. After a terrible accident, the two children have to survive on their own, and this takes them through the dark alleyways, factories, and even sewers of the nearby town. Some parts are quite scary, and others are strange in a larger-than-life kind of way, including the descriptions of the machines in the factories. The characters are wonderful, though, and as always, there is a sense of atmosphere in Ms. Aiken's books that I've found no where else. Highly recommended.