Harklights

Product Information

Harklights is an utterly enchanting adventure that sends out a pure and powerful message that no matter how small you are in this world , you have a power, responsibility and influence over protecting the natural world around you. Polly Crosby tells ReadingZone about her novel, This Tale is Forbidden (Scholastic), a fractured fairy tale set in a dystopian world.

It is the story of Wick, an orphan who has grown up in the harsh surroundings of Harklights, an 'orphanage' where the children spend all day making and packing matches for the owner, Miss Boggatt (or Old Ma Bogey, as she is known). Yet there have always been books like this - way back to the Little Grey Men, through Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood - so this new explosion is sometimes more stylistic than thematic. Charmingly written and imbued with a vital, heartfelt message, this is a story sure to settle in the heart of anyone who has ever stood and breathed in the beauty of a forest or marvelled at a spell-binding sunset. Wick is an orphan forced to work in a match factory under the cruel eye of Old Ma Bogey, a villainous overseer with a metal thumb and blood red lipstick. Vonk is een boek dat zich typeert door een flink moraaltje maar is vooral een spannend en zeer sfeervol geïllustreerd verhaal over Wiek die keihard moet werken om te overleven in het weeshuis Vonk en verlangt naar een huis zoals hij die kan bouwen met verdwaalde luciferstokjes.

Tim Tilley studied illustration at Anglia Ruskin University and now teaches children's book illustration courses at City Lit.

After all, nobody has ever got away from the match factory orphanage, and now there’s magic in the form of tiny Hobs, offering him a way out. However, In the finale Wick is able to use his inventiveness to defeat Ma Bogey and realises he didn’t need a magical ability. Yet it is all that Wick’s ever known; the porridge meals, chalked floor bed and fear of Ma Bogey’s iron-thumbed stick.This experience has been fantastic primarily for the children, the school and also for me (professionally). The pace is not uncommon in children's literature - The Silver Arrow suffers from it, so does Cogheart, The Train to Impossible Places and Sarah Driver's Sea. Harklights, despite being very competent and readable, doesn't really do anything new and comes across like a shadow of better books, both past and contemporary.