If you do read to children regularly, you soon discover how much unedited rubbish is packaged up for them under cover of a celebrity name and gargoylish cartoons. The mental red-penning is exhausting. So Joan Aiken’s fairy tales are a gift: a real, skillful writer who brings as much craft and care to bedtime stories as grown-up novels. The title story of her first collaboration with the equally bewitching illustrator, Jan Pienkowski, manages to be completely fresh while sounding as polished with telling as something from the Hans Christian Anderson canon (the repetitive formulas of fairy tales are, I would argue, a form of oral poetry we all know). The North Wind blesses a young girl with a necklace of raindrops that has magical powers, and says he will bring a new drop each birthday; then “he flew away up into the sky, pushing the clouds before him so that the moon and stars could shine out”. Who wouldn’t want to hear what happens next?
First published in A Necklace of Raindrops and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1968; frequently reprinted
A Personal Anthology 