Read Wolves Chronicles 08 – Is Underground free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Joan Aiken's Is Underground is a wolf-haunted adventure for 9 year olds about a small, fierce girl who keeps a promise to a dying stranger.
Is Twite lives in a barn in the woods on Blackheath Edge with her older sister Penny and a bony cat called Figgin. One frosty night the wolves chase a man right up to their door. They drag him inside, patch up his bites and give him mint tea.
By morning he's feverish and calling for his son, Arun. The boy ran off to London to sing songs, which his strict family didn't allow. And the stranger turns out to be their Uncle Hosiah.
Before he dies, he begs Is to find his boy. So off she goes.
In London, things are very wrong. There are hardly any children left on the streets. Even the king's own son has gone missing (and the king can't tell anyone). Then someone whispers to Is about a place called Playland, and a secret message turns up in her pocket, iced on a pancake.
Is is the best thing about it. She's quick, brave and very sure of herself, and she talks in her own London slang (she says "Croopus!" a lot). Every so often there's a page of her journal, written in her own spelling. Something like "Me an Penny as bin R guing" might need reading aloud the first few times!
It's a London of frost and fog, pie-sellers and Bow Street Runners, with wolves in the woods outside. It all feels very real even when it clearly isn't our history.
A heads-up on the first chapter, though. The uncle dies there, coughing blood from his wolf bites. It's where the story starts rather than a twist. Some children also find the idea of other children vanishing a bit unsettling.
If your reader loves a heroine who takes on the grown-ups' problem and refuses to be scared, they'll adore Is. Her big sister Dido is a Twite too, and turns up in other books in the Wolves Chronicles.
If this one goes down well, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has more hungry wolves in the snow and a girl called Bonnie waiting impatiently at a great window for her cousin to arrive.
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