I got 1/2-way and just could not make myself pick it up again. I'm sure it doesn't help that I read #3 first, not knowing, and have not read #1 (and am not likely to be able to). Should I ever get the trilogy together I will try again.

Set a year or two after the events of The Summer Birds, this second children's novel concerning the strange and fantastical adventures of the Makepeace sisters follows Emma - the younger of the two, terribly lonely since Charlotte went off to boarding school, and her friend, Marly Scragg, left the village school to work in her father's shop - through a particularly fierce and snowy winter term. Haunted by a recurring dream, in which she is flying high above a strangely familiar landscape, Emma finds that she is joined, on her nighttime journeys, by Bobby Fumpkins, the chubby and much-ridiculed school outcast, to whom Emma herself has been none too kind. Slowly, with stops and starts, the two dreamers become friends. But where will their shared dreams, which seem to be taking them further and further back in time, lead them? And what will they find, once there...?

With the same feeling of strange and disquieting enchantment as its predecessor, and a similarly haunting exploration of conflicted, but deeply-felt emotions, Emma in Winter is a powerful book. I found Farmer's language in this one particularly beautiful, and had to stop, from time to time, and reread certain passages. The scene in which she describes the changing landscape beneath the dream-flying Emma and Bobby in particular, has a power that is difficult to capture, save by quotation:

"As they flew, they saw deserts replaces seas, seas replace deserts, water flowing in and out like enormous tides. There were green seas, brown seas, gray seas, blue seas, calm and wild ones, small and big ones. But every desert burned orange and tawny, their sands ebbing and flowing like water, their rocks shifting like roses back to bud, or like onions forming, skin on skin.
Until suddenly, not merely sand or sea but the whole land seemed to move, to rock like a million cradles. Mountains rose, rocked there, and sank back. They heaved up thickly like the bubbles in boiling porridge. But where those bubbles burst in the boiling, their centers were filled with a white-hot fire, and a heavy liquid melted from the land to flow upwards, darkly, to the bubbles' crests and vanish into these white-hot pits of fire."

Just lovely! I'm not sure why I never got around to Penelope Farmer's books, when a younger reader, but I'm glad I've finally rectified that omission. I look forward to the final volume about the Makepeace sisters, Charlotte Sometimes, and after that, to exploring more of Farmer's work! ( )

Summary: Now that Charlotte has gone off to boarding school, Emma Makepeace is left alone and mostly friendless in her small town. Added to that, she's begun having strange, frightnening dreams of flying that involve Bobby Fumpkins, a fat, unpopular boy from school. Then she finds out that he's having the same dreams, and they must learn what the dreams want with them, and how to escape from their power.

Review: I didn't particularly care for this book - it's not as interesting as Charlotte Sometimes and doesn't have the charm of The Summer Birds. It's kind of a mystery, except the ending doesn't really explain anything about why they're having the dreams or what they meant or anything. Added to that, both Bobby and Emma kind of annoyed me - they may be pretty realistic pre-teens, especially for when this was written, but they're not ones that I'd want to spend much time around.

Recommendation: Skip it. There's some nice descriptive passages but the actual plot's pretty weak. ( )