A little bit time travel, in a way, and a little bit like a ghost story. ?áInteresting the different covers it's been given....

?áPretty intense bit about the mother and Mark, the older brother, back in Australia. ?áInteresting events at the boarding school - not really all that relevant to the paranormal events at Cousin Eunice's place on the weekends, but an insightful little story on their own. ?áI really like Cousin Eunice - she's a math teacher at Oxford, single, in her early 30s, quite comfortable with her role as caregiver but not a substitute mother at all.

Recommended if any of the aspects of the description, or the author's reputation, appeal to you... just don't expect to be blown away. ( )

This time-slip adventure from Joan Aiken, author of the beloved children's classic The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, follows the story of Cosmo Curtoys, who finds himself sent back to England after the mysterious disappearance of his mother and older brother in Australia. Here he learns of a curse which has plagued his family for generations, and confronts a series of ghosts... or are they ghosts?

This was an entertaining story, although I felt that it would have had a more powerful effect upon me if I had read it as a child or adolescent. It had some interesting discussions of the "nature" of magic and science, with a possible reconciliation of the two hinted at in comments about dimensions - a nice reference to Edwin Abbott's Flatland. ( )

Joan Aiken was one of those writers who made the task of reading her books not a task at all, just a pleasure to slip between the sheets and lose yourself in the narrative. Her command of story and speech seems so effortless yet true to life. The story opens in a 20th-century airport, Heathrow, with a youngster waiting to be collected by a relative, an opening so unlike many Aiken novels as to feel incongruous. There is a mystery surrounding Cosmo's family back in Australia, a mystery which gradually unfolds itself but which sets up an atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety which maintains itself right through to the end.

Cosmo has been sent to stay in what at first appears to be a rural idyll outside Oxford. His female cousin, an eccentric but reassuring Oxford don that I wanted to like, is strangely the only weak character in the story: I couldn't quite accept that an academic could come up with some of the pseudo-scientific language and concepts that she occasionally uses. However, Cosmo's experiences as a weekly boarder at a minor a fee-paying school on the Woodstock Road, though seemingly anachronistic for the 1980s, probably reflected the arcane and traditionalist nature of that kind of institution which no doubt continues to this day; Aiken may have drawn on her own experiences as a 12-year-old at Wychwood Boarding School in Oxford in 1936.

The core of this novel is Cosmo's attempt to cope with the notion that his bloodline was cursed around two thousand years ago: do curses work, and if they do can they persist over the millennia? I was unconvinced both by the ability of certain characters to recount circumstantial details of all that time ago and the final dramatic resolution of the mystery in the closing pages. However, Cosmo was an admirable and personable boy, he called on inner resources when faced with paranormal experiences, and was very much in the mould of the traditional British lad familiar from Empire writers, exhibiting all those commendable virtues that perhaps were disappearing in the late 20th century. In short, it was a heart-warming tale but a tad unrealistic, given the supernatural premise. Oh, and the shadow guests of the title? They are the manifestations of individuals from Cosmo's ancestral past, some less shadowy than others, and not all very welcome as guests.

http://calmgrove.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/guests/ ( )

After his mother and brother mysteriously disappear, Cosmo's father sends him from Australia to live with his mathematician aunt in England, where he must deal with being the new boy at school...and with the ghosts who appear to him around his aunt's house. Aiken entwines the natural and supernatural events cleverly and unfolds the mystery of the ghosts gradually; as always, she has a gift for making an imaginative plot seem convincing and believable. This isn't as good as the Dido books (the early ones, anyway) or _Midnight Is a Place_, but it's good nonetheless. ( )