Willa and Old Miss Annie

by Berlie Doherty, Kim Lewis (Illustrator)

Appears "as new" copy, with minimal signs of handlng/reading wear;

Genres: Childrens

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

About the author

Berlie Doherty née Hollingsworth is an English novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter. She is best known for children's books, for which she has twice won the Carnegie Medal.She has also written novels for adults, plays for theatre and radio, television series and libretti for children's opera.

Reviews

[Manybooks]

Well and to tell the truth, I do find Berlie Doherty's presented text for her 1994 and Carnegie Nominee chapter book Willa and Old Miss Annie a bit too simplistic and choppy for my personal reading tastes, with the narrative connections often not feeling all that smooth, and indeed to the point that Doherty's story of Willa and Old Miss Annie's intergenerational friendship often does not truly read like a tale with a specific beginning, a middle and an ending, and that for me, Willa and Old Miss Annie thus seems more like an outline for three separate anecdotes which aside of them featuring different animals and the friendship mentioned above really do not feel all that thematically similar and commented, and as such kind of are just rather annoyingly hanging and floating in space so to speak. And while Berlie Doherty's three chapters for Willa and Old Miss Annie (featuring friendship, a goat, a pony and a fox) are certainly sweet enough in and of themselves, yes, as a whole, as a chapter book, I certainly am left generally rather textually disappointed (because when I read stories, both my adult self and also my inner child want not just choppy bits and pieces of fiction but a plot line with a solid and long ranging thread, and that in my opinion this does not really all than much occur in and with Willa and Old Miss Annie, this certainly does frustrate and bother me, and that my appreciation of Willa and Old Miss Annie's friendship is simply not sufficient and allows me to ignore the textual shortfalls). Furthermore, after reading three of Berlie Doherty's young adult novels recently and just adoring her textual oh so solid and delightful sense of geographic place, that in Willa and Old Miss Annie Doherty to and for me basically provides no sense of place whatsoever except the rather vague mentioning that Willa and her parents have moved to a foreign, to a different country, but that we as readers do not ever know which are supposed to be the countries being considered, I honestly and truly have found this so majorly annoying that my rating for Willa and Old Miss Annie can and will only be two stars (but that I am very grudgingly upping my ranking of Willa and Old Miss Annie to three stars, since the friendship between Willa and Old Miss Annie is pretty darn sweet and in particular since its intergenerational quality is definitely rather touching and also really nicely tender and engaging).