Release date: September 1, 2002 | Age Range: 8 and up | Series: W.I.T.C.H. | Lexile Measure: 800L (What's this?)
When the darkness,
tolls the hour,
I shall have you
in my power...
Lynn and her best friend, Mouse, are positive their neighbor, Mrs. Tuggle, is a witch. And they suspect the old woman is forcing Lynn's sister, Judith, to join her coven to witches. But Lynn and Mouse can't prove anything and their parents don't believe them. the girls are desperate to expose Mrs. Tuggle's evil nature, especially since her actions are becoming more threatening everyday.
Now Lynn's parents have announced that they're going away for the weekend, leaving Judith and Mrs. Tuggle in charge. Can the girls outsmart Mrs. Tuggle and save Lynn's family -- or is the dark magic too strong to conquer?
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Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has written more than 135 books, including the Newbery Award–winning Shiloh and the Alice series. She lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. To hear from Phyllis and find out more about what’s in store for Alice, visit AliceMcKinley.com.
Product Details
Age Range: 8 and up
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Aladdin; Original edition (September 1, 2002)
I guess I've been writing for about as long as I can remember. Telling stories, anyway, if not writing them down. I had my first short story published when I was sixteen, and wrote stories to help put myself through college, planning to become a clinical psychologist. By the time I graduated with a BA degree, however, I decided that writing was really my first love, so I gave up plans for graduate school and began writing full time.
I'm not happy unless I spend some time writing every day. It's as though pressure builds up inside me, and writing even a little helps to release it. On a hard-writing day, I write about six hours. Tending to other writing business, answering mail, and just thinking about a book takes another four hours. I spend from three months to a year on a children's book, depending on how well I know the characters before I begin and how much research I need to do. A novel for adults, because it's longer, takes a year or more. When my work is going well, I wake early in the mornings, hoping it's time to get up. When the writing is hard and the words are flat, I'm not very pleasant to be around.
Getting an idea for a book is the easy part. Keeping other ideas away while I'm working on one story is what's difficult. My books are based on things that have happened to me, things I have heard or read about, all mixed up with imaginings. The best part about writing is the moment a character comes alive on paper, or when a place that existed only in my head becomes real. There are no bands playing at this moment, no audience applauding--a very solitary time, actually--but it's what I like most. I've now had more than 120 books published, and about 2000 short stories, articles and poems.
I live in Bethesda, Maryland, with my husband, Rex, a speech pathologist, who's the first person to read my manuscripts when they're finished. Our sons, Jeff and Michael, are grown now, but along with their wives and children, we often enjoy vacations together in the mountains or at the ocean. When I'm not writing, I like to hike, swim, play the piano and attend the theater.
I'm lucky to have my family, because they have contributed a great deal to my books. But I'm also lucky to have the troop of noisy, chattering characters who travel with me inside my head. As long as they are poking, prodding, demanding a place in a book, I have things to do and stories to tell.
A house with dark shadows and bad energy, on top of a windswept hill ... an old lady who, at first, seems like a kindly grandma but perhaps is more of a sinister figure ... a young girl who watches with growing concern as her older sister acts more and more strangely after spending increasing amounts of time in the old lady's house on top of the hill ... what a well-written, spooky tale (the ending is especially thrilling)! And luckily for readers, this is the first in a series of books about this brave young girl's battle with evil. Too bad it's not available right now -- this is a classic book that all kids AND adults would enjoy reading.
This book and its two sequels were some of my favorite books when I was a kid, although the third one--THE WITCH HERSELF--was not as good as the first two. This is a convincingly creepy book, and what makes it especially good is that the author is very careful not to show anything that definitely proves that Judith and Mrs. Tuggle can do magic, thus leaving the question open as to whether Lynn and Mouse are imagining things. The friendship between Lynn and Mouse is well-drawn, and the author does a good job of integrating the supernatural plot in with everyday happenings of Lynn and Mouse's life.
I think it's kind of sad that this author has fallen prey to the trap of writing SERIES books like the Alice series. This is one of her older books, and although it has a few sequels, it is one-of-a-kind and does not have that "first of a series" production-line quality that has ruined children's literature. Highly original, truly scary, richly evocative...a wonderful justaposition of creepy magic and mundane suburbia. A modern classic of sorts.
