Bogwoppit (A Puffin Book)

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. My pick for the book I would take from my childhood favourites to read and reread on a desert island for June was Bogwoppit by Ursula Moray Williams. Weaving humour, fantasy and suspense into a highly inventive story, its eco theme and larger-than-life characters ensure its popularity with today’s young readers. Her classic stories often involved brave creatures who overcome trials and cruelty in the outside world before finding a loving home.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is, she discovers, a bogwoppit, an animal assumed extinct, and one of many that come up through the drains from the outside pond. Ursula Moray Williams (19 April 1911 – 17 October 2006) was an English children’s author of nearly 70 books for children.Ursula Moray Williams was born on 19 April 1911 at Petersfield, Hampshire, ten minutes after her twin sister, Barbara. She wrote and illustrated over sixty books for children with the most notable being Gobbolino the Witch's Cat and The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I have been looking for this book for years because I LOVED it as a child, but it's always out of print. THE BOGWOPPIT is a light-hearted, lively story, brilliantly told by Ursula Moray Williams, author of GOBBOLINO (also available in A Puffin Book series).

Aunt Daisy wants to get rid of them all, but Samantha grows very fond of one and can't bear to part with him. The antisocial aunt lives in a mansion in a park, and absolutely does not want the girl staying there. The way the relationship develops between these two spiky and independent characters, who we can see are lonely and actually need each other, is fun to read and I think all children secretly dream of being able to speak to adults the way Samantha does and getting away with it!The appeal of this book is the humour and the sheer level of imagination that has gone into the story. I think this is the genius of the writing, how the author manages to create a strong personality in a creature that has no language to communicate.

In the cellar of Park House, the old mansion where orphaned Samantha has been sent to stay with her disagreeable aunt Daisy, there are hundreds of bogwoppits - believed extinct, up till now.I won't change my rating since it's based on how much I loved it as a child, but it took me more than half the book to figure out what it was that I saw in it when I read it over 20 years ago. The book suffers from what most of the other reviewers have said - they (like me) read it when they were young and assumed their kids would like it too now. But found, as ever with Williams' books, that the books have an old-fashionedness of the very worst kind, the casual disrespect for anyone who is not English speaking, white, middle class kind. With a new foreword and the original drawings by Shirley Hughes, it’s a great pleasure to see this title by a gifted storyteller back in print.

I love it just as much today as I did back then, and I think it’s a brilliantly constructed, cleverly written and humorous story that will appeal to any generation. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. The book feels a bit dated now, A child being left to find somewhere to live whilst her relatives move to America to live, school does nothing just accepts the change.

There are host of well-developed and hilarious characters here, all interacting in madcap ways, to make an entertaining and fulfilling story. I would have preferred more about the old house and garden, and less about the bogwoppits, who are unpleasant and stinky, but it a child who enjoys all the magical creature books around today were to somehow come across it, they might like the bogwoppits much more than I did. Many people will know Ursula Moray Williams for her more famous books, Gobbolino the Witch’s Catand The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, both of which I loved, but my favourite of her books was always Bogwoppit.