forever we try

A couple weeks ago my roommates got to make a trip to The Book Thing, a warehouse full of donated books in Baltimore where once a month you can come in and pick out as many books us you want for free.  (Technically, there's a limit of 150,000 books per person per day, but GEEZ.) There's also a one-hour time limit; my roommates still managed to grab a whole bunch of books. Some of those were for me, including two in one of my favorite categories, Random Old Children's Books.

Here they are: 

A Chill in the Lane by Mabel Esther Allan
An atmospheric, not especially spooky ghost story set in Cornwall. On vacation with her family, Lyd begins experiencing visions of a cottage in the woods that isn't actually there, and starts to suspect it might tie back to her Cornish heritage--Lyd is adopted, and her parents, especially her father, would rather not talk about her biological family. That huge red flag aside, Lyd's parents are actually much more supportive than secretive adoptive families in ghost stories usually are. It's sweet but doesn't make for tense reading. But this is more of a family story with some light Gothic/ghost story elements. 

(This book also has a list of "Other Good Books for Girls" on the back. One of them, Tina and David, gets this kicker of a blurb: "[...] beautiful and exquisitely tasteful. Mrs. Tate has proved that a good book for the young can be written without sex, crime, or drugs.")

Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken
A reread and an old favorite. This is the third book in Aiken's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. The first book is a pretty standard pastiche of 19th century children's lit with a little bit of alternative history thrown in--at least that's how I remember it; it's also my least favorite book in the series--and every book after gets weirder and weirder. 

Nightbirds isn't quite peak Aiken weirdness, but it's getting there. Dido Twite, the closest this series has to a central heroine, wakes up after a months-long coma on a whaling ship headed, eventually, for Nantucket. Captain Casket only cares about chasing an elusive pink whale, but he promises Dido passage home if she can keep his daughter, Dutiful Penitence, company. This apparently includes staying with Dutiful Penitence and the girl's aunt, Tribulation, on Nantucket for a couple of months. 

Dutiful Penitence ("Pen"), doesn't have good memories of her aunt, and once the girls arrive in Nantucket they figure out that Tribulation is still a piece of work, staying in bed the whole day and running them ragged with chores. Dido also discovers a black dress and pair of bottle-green boots hidden in the attic, and begins to suspect that Aunt Tribulation isn't who she says she is. 

Part of the fun of this book is that, even though she's stuck in an objectively terrifying situation--holed up on an isolated farm with an imposter--Dido refuses to let Aunt Tribulation scare her. Here's a typical interaction between them: 

My reading tracker has a space for recording each book's genre. For this one I went with "Aiken."