the snow spider is definately one of my favorite books of all time. when I was reading it, everyone was trying to get me to do something, ANYTHING besides read that book, but nothing anyone did could make me stop. after i read this book, I had to read "orchard of the cresant moon," and "the chesnut soldier." I often think of the snow spider now, and wish that i could be a magician like gwen, and do things like see pictures from a different world. Jenny Nimmo is extremely creative, and i know i will remember this book forever.

Gwyn's 5 gifts from his grandmother, Nain, take Gwyn's imagination to a whole new level. After finding out that he's a witch, he experences new things that he never thought was possible without the gifts. But the most important things that he wants most of all, is to bring his sister back that disappeared 4 years earlier and to bring his family back together. With the help of a magical snow spider named Arainwen he goes to beat the challenges of the mortal world to bring his sister home.

the best book and an added bonus of finally finding my name, i especially love all the characters and the way that everyone in their own magical way is a beautiful character

I thought I'd seen it all in the way of domestic gurus, but that Stewart person has got NOTHING on Ms. Asher.

This lovely book contains simple, elegant recipes, practical yet glamorous gift ideas and creative, fun projects to make with children as well as loads of helpful hints. It was originally intended to accompany Jane's popular BBC television show of the same name, but you don't need to have seen a single episode in order to appreciate the contents. Chock full of colorful pics so delicious looking you'll want to cut them out and eat them, "The Best of Good Living..." is as beautiful as Jane herself!!

This one is a keeper!!

You don't have to sew to love this book. You don't even have to ever make one of the many brilliant costumes described in this book to love it. Jane Asher's clever creative ideas and terrible, terrible puns, combined with wonderful celebrity photos are a delightful entertainment just to read. If you do chose to make one of her costumes, the instructions are well-written and easy to follow. She has tried, with mixed success, to translate some of the materials for the American audience. Included are several costumes which are visual puns and require almost no materials and no talent at all. However several of the fancier costumes are quite elaborate, so this book should please the sewer and non-sewer alike. Check out the dazzling photos of Haley Mills, James Coburn, Peter Asher and others. Note, this book is also published under the title Jane Asher's Fancy Dress.

A wonderful source for costume making, for both children and adults. Imaginative, witty and creative.

Although this book includes assembly and materials information, some prior sewing and/or crafts experience is useful. The book is written using British terminology and metric dimensions. The instructions are more conceptual than detailed.

It's a wonderful book, not just for Halloween.

Jane Asher's Party Cakes is beautiful, readable, clever and very liberating... she has a "do-what-works" attitude that is refreshingly diferent from many of the other books on the subject. Here she presents a series of 3 dimensional, sculpted cakes, decorated in rolled fondant. Subjects range from an ornate piano (complete with rice paper sheet music) to an extraordinarily life-like snail. The cakes are rated by difficulty, but even a novice can have great success with the difficult ones, as the techniques are well illustrated and broken down into easy steps. Lovely to look at and even more fun to use, this book should be a part of any cake decorating hobbyist's library.

We have this book on tape. The narration is wonderful because of the British accents. We like Bob and Fatso. Dick King Smith is our favorite author.

35 years ago, as a very young girl, I also dreamed of visiting Greece after reading this book and "The Moonspinners". I see that all this time later, Mary Stewart's wonderful stories are still working the same magic... I love all of her books - she will always have a special place among my favorite authors - for her dry and subtle sense of humor, great storytelling ability and of course... that rich descriptive prose (I can't think of anyone else who does it so well). The Merlin books are being reissued - so should all of the romantic suspense (or should they be in the travel section?) :)

I'm so glad to see some of Mary Stewart's romantic fiction reissued. As a young girl I envisioned Greece while reading My Brother Michael, as a young adult I went there and it was sublime. We read and, then, we experience. If you read to see the world, start at home with Mary Stewart and let your imaginations take you to Europe; her books will grow with you. With Madam Will you Talk in mind, (her best I think) I danced on the entrance to the Pont d'Avignon, I stood on Hadrian's Wall and thought of the Ivy Tree; Corfu did indeed boast men named Spiro, but sadly, no magic dolphin. I wish there were more of her books.

"My Brother Michael" was such a good book! It has beautiful descriptions of Greece, and the characters were so interesting. I've read almost all of Mary Stewart's books, and they all give that kind of depressed feeling. Not that they're sad (well, the Merlin Trilogy is), but her books just envelope you, and you can't stop reading them. I love her books, and I wish that she'd written more.

This is a great book for young adults. Full of suspense and characteristic flairs. Mary Stewart brings alive the silent countryside of Austria with this thriller.

Mary Stewart's Ivy Tree got me hooked on reading and I've read every book she's written. The villain in this book is so memorable I have always remembered his name. This book like all of her books marries romance and mystery but in a way no modern books do, it is romance, not sex. All of her books give you information on either classic works or other historic backgrounds, like the Spanish Riding School, that I got big points from my Humanities teachers from things I learned from Mary Stewart, I never told them how I knew the information. This is one of her best, the people are memorable and the horse is miraculous. Just a treat all round. Read all her mysteries you can't go wrong

Like other reviewers, I read most of Mary Stewart's novels as a teenager when they were called "Gothics". Nine Coaches Waiting and Wildfire at Midnight were wonderful, and among my favorites, but Airs Above the Ground lingers in my memory as the best of Mary Stewart's works. The scene with the old horse on the hillside gives me chills and brings tears to my eyes every time I read it, or even think about it. I went to see the Lippizaners in Austria just because of the influence of this book. Read it--you won't be disappointed.

I have just finished House of Stairs for the 3rd time. I know little about writing and read mostly commercial fiction. However, the quality of Rendell's writing is at times breath taking. Her device is this book for shifting from the past to the present is simple and elegant. There is really no who done it here, only a why done it. And when you find out why, its so ordinary that you wonder why you read so long to get there. The why is that Rendell writes so good and dribbles the information out is dribs and drabs that you keep reading. You know early on that the narrator may or may not have a dread disease but it isn't identified until about 15% into the book.

One of the drawbacks to this book is the lack of sympathetic characters. Maybe its my age, but there is really no main character is this book who is likeable (although there are a couple which you care about). Elizabeth is the narrator but has an unfathomable weakness when it comes to Belle with whom there cannot be any type of healthy relationship. Belle is a flagrant sociopath who is only interesting because of the degree and outlandishness of her coldness and selfishness. Cossette is the all-time post child for co-dependency. Mark comes closest to being decent but in the end destroys Elizabeth and Cossette's relationship to save his own. There is no one in this group I'd ever want to be friends with.

As Elizabeth Vetch is travelling down the street in a taxi, she suddenly spots a woman whom she used to know many years before. A woman that she thought was still in prison. She calls the vehicle to a stop, and rushes off in pursuit of her old friend. Eventually, Elizabeth looses her amid the bustle of London. Then, here memories triggered by this event, she begins to tell the reader her story...

It's a tale that leads to a time when Elizabeth was staying in a tall boarding house (known by its residents as the House of Stairs) run by her kindly old friend Cosette, when all the varied inhabitants lived in peace and harmony, and when she was in a relationship with the enigmatic Bell, a woman who will soon be arrested for murder. But, then Mark comes into their lives, and the effects of his presence soon mean that none of their lives will ever be the same again. For death is following in his path...

Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) is quite, quite marvellous. The way she mixes past and present, the current story and the flashbacks to the events which happened at the House of Stairs is masterful, and not nearly as confusing as a lesser writer might make it. Her demonstrations of how the past can hold an inextricable grip on all our future's are brilliantly subtle. The characters she creates are almost unbearably realistic, and few of them are likeable. Even the kindly Cosette's needy dependency may grate on some after a while. She also injects a great subplot concerning the fact that Elizabeth, our narrator, may well have inherited the Huntington's Chorea that runs in her family.

The suspense Rendell creates with the almost unbearably slow (although never, ever boring) teasing out of her plots is immense, and she maintains it right to the end, when the final surprise is revealed. Some longstanding fans of Rendell may be able to guess the main subtle twist that she uses (but not all she has up her sleeve), for she has used a similar one before (but in a rather different way). But then, as another reviewer has said, very aptly, of Rendell, "she pulls back the curtain to reveal, rather than to surprise".

Vine/Rendell is not going to be ideal for anyone who prefers their thrillers to be fast-paced and exciting, with constant surprises, but if you're the sort of reader who admires an intelligent, immaculately written thriller, full of realistic characters, subtle suspense, and with one or two surprises along the way, then there is no one better at providing this that Rendell. The House of Stairs is a prime example

The Book is really good because the reader really has to think and has to find out who the killer is, and who she/he wants to kill. There is also a good version for non-English speakers! (Its for Intermediate -1650 words) The book was written by Barbara Vine, she is one of the most popular crime and mystery writers.

In the story is an old Lady who is really lonely and wants to be younger and to have a husband. Her best friend Elizabeth is always helping her with her problems. Cossette (the old Lady) is really rich so she buys her a new house with 106 stairs, then Bell Sanger, who was in prison because she killed her husband for money, meets Elizabeth on the street. What effect will she have? Later Liz (Elizabeth) falls in love with Bell. Liz is so happy but does Bell feel the same? Later Bell brings her brother Mark to the house of stairs. Cossette falls in love with him and Mark with her. Soon they are together, but is Mark really the right one for Cossette? And why is Bell so strange? Read the book and you will find out.

By Lilly F.

I generally prefer Mary Stewart's less ambiguous romantic suspense novels. Thornyhold was a dower house inhabited by the upright wife of a wicked rake of the Victorian era. Sybil was succeeded by our heroine's mother's cousin, Geillis, and, in turn, by our heroine, another Geillis. The three "witches" are not quite the same, but share a taste for healing, and a love of animals. As our Geillis' talent is nurtured in the house in the woods, she finds herself in need of more than herbal wards to protect herself from the unwanted attentions of another woman in the area who considers herself something of a witch -- and not precisely a white one at that.

Stewart does a nice job of preserving ambiguity, allowing dual explanations for nearly every event in the book, without it becoming mechanical or some sort of apology. The characters are pleasant, especially the animals. On the whole, an enjoyable read.

Heroine: everywoman

Life can be difficult for an only child raised by strict religious parents, and this was certainly the case for Geillis Ramsey who had no friends (not even a pet) to call her own for most of her young life.

Fortunately what Jilly does have is a fairy Godmother of sorts; her mother's cousin who keeps an eye out for her interests even as she is traveling the globe. She makes certain that young Jilly is provided for when her parents leave her alone in the world as a young woman with no real prospects. She gives her Thornyhold, a beautiful old Georgian House that once belonged to a witch named Goody Gostelow, which becomes a refuge for the poor young Geillis.

But how truly safe is she at her new shelter? A disturbing dream, messages from the great beyond, and neighbors who send out mixed signals as to whether or not they want her there leave Geillis wondering about the sanctity of her new home and the sanity of her mind.

What worked for me:

For the most part this is a very gentle pastoral story filled with lovely descriptions of a time gone by in the countryside of England 50+ years ago when not all houses had phones, neighbors dropped in to clean your house with you, and herbal remedies were more trusted than doctor's prescriptions. But the first few chapters about Geillis as a child, which were necessary to show why she is the way she is and add depth to the story, were decidedly sad in several places.

Size-wise Geillis wasn't really described, but her neighbor was a fairly large woman.

What didn't work for me:

Because of its idyllic pace it didn't have me on the edge of my seat the way I expect a gothic romance should. In fact the romance and even the suspense in "Thornyhold" were very mild, almost secondary even, so that I think the book seems more like a light paranormal fiction than a gothic.

Overall:

A very sweet story worth indulging in, especially if you are a fan of witches and/or gardening.

Warning: There are a few references to the occult in this novel.

If you liked "Thornyhold" you might also enjoy "The Dancing Floor".

I've been reading Mary Stewart since high school, which was a long time ago. I've always been taken with her ability to evoke a sense of place and atmosphere. In THORNYHOLD she does this superbly. In STORMY PETRAL and ROSE COTTAGE I, very sadly, felt her advanced age was affecting her writing. I was afraid I'd read my last really good Mary Stewart book. However, THORNYHOLD is wonderful; a lovely place to escape to when you need a break from this hectic modern world, and feel the need to spend some time in a romantic cottage full of magic. I recommend you visit soon and often.