Bogwoppit (A Puffin Book)

Product Information

THE BOGWOPPIT is a light-hearted, lively story, brilliantly told by Ursula Moray Williams, author of GOBBOLINO (also available in A Puffin Book series). After her husband's death in 1974, Ursula Moray Williams remained active, writing, gardening, giving talks and visiting her family in various parts of the world. It is, she discovers, a bogwoppit, an animal assumed extinct, and one of many that come up through the drains from the outside pond.

Biography: Ursula Moray Williams was born on 19 April 1911 at Petersfield, Hampshire, ten minutes after her twin sister, Barbara. 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. Her classic stories often involved brave creatures who overcome trials and cruelty in the outside world before finding a loving home. The antisocial aunt lives in a mansion in a park, and absolutely does not want the girl staying there.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. The story is interesting, I remember being gripped by it as a kid, and with a group of my friends, because it has more tragedy in it than most books for kids that age, and yet it's fun, quirky, and has so many things in it that you want in a story at that age.

She discovers they were thought to be extinct, and is deeply horrified when her aunt, who considers them pests, kills all of them with poison. Aunt Daisy wants to get rid of them all, but Samantha grows very fond of one and can't bear to part with him.

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. Their relationship gets off to a shaky start, made all the more precarious by the unexpected appearance in the kitchen of a curious wide-eyed creature with a long furry tale, feathered wings and two webbed feet. It used to make me think amazing things can happen to anyone, which is always the best kind of children’s book. 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. She has been abandoned in a decaying old house by her aristocratic explorer husband, fighting the creeping damp and the encroaching bogwoppits and it has made her afraid and bitter.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.There are host of well-developed and hilarious characters here, all interacting in madcap ways, to make an entertaining and fulfilling story. 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!