Dido and Pa

by Joan Aiken

Overview

A teenage adventurer gets wrapped up in her father’s dastardly schemes in this children’s novel by the author of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

Dido Twite is finally back in London and reunited with her old friend Simon, now the Duke of Battersea and a favorite of King Richard. But no sooner does Dido start to settle in than her rascally father, Abednago, appears and drags her off into the night.

Soon Dido finds herself caught in the midst of another dastardly conspiracy: a Hanoverian plot involving a mysterious double for the king, the miraculous healing powers of music, and a spy network made up of abandoned street children called lollpoops. Meanwhile, out in the forest, starving wolves are closing in on the city . . .

Dido and Pa is the seventh book in the award-winning Wolves Chronicles, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547562384
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	05/12/2021
Series:	Wolves Chronicles Series , #7
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	316
Sales rank:	433,931
Lexile:	930L (what's this?)
File size:	492 KB
Age Range:	10 - 12 Years

About the Author

<P>Joan Aiken, daughter of the American writer Conrad Aiken, was born in Rye, Sussex, England, and has written more than sixty books for children, including <I>The Wolves of Willoughby Chase</I>.

Editorial Reviews

Simon, first met in Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, meets up with Dido Twite in Dido and Pa (1986), which PW called "a tempestuous and atmospheric sequel to The Stolen Lake." Here, Dido returns to England only to be sucked into her father's dangerous plot to usurp the King's power. "Almost nonstop, the story's thrilling actions rush onward."

Publishers Weekly

Gr 5-8 Aiken's tales of Dido Twite are among her rollicking best, and Dido and Pa is no exception. Reunited at long last with Simon (whom readers first met in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase Doubleday, 1962), Dido has just begun to describe her adventures when her Pa, having decoyed Simon, kidnaps his daughter and returns with her to London. The evil Eisengrim , head of the Hanoverians with whom Mr. Twite has long been involved, is plotting to overthrow King Richard and install his own puppet, a look-alike whom Pa expects Dido to prepare for his role as royal imposter. In an operatic plot filled with shifting scenes and shifty characters, complications are presented, compounded, and finally undone, with nearly all of the right people in the right places at the end. Mr. Twite, however, is absent from the final curtain call; and Dido, although painfully aware that her pa is bad beyond helping, recognizes the worth of his music and knows that without him, her life will lack some of its rich color. Aiken's talent for language and dialogue gives voice to the vigorous London street life she portrays: the children of poverty, the sellers of foodstuffs, the laborers. Building one subplot upon another, she moves from scene to scene with the ease of a skilled dramatist, creating entanglements that, like a cat's cradle, all come neatly together at the end of the tale. Satisfying. Dudley B. Carlson, Princeton Public Library, N.J.

School Library Journal