I chose spooky books for Halloween week!
Monday, I shared Thornhill by Pam Smy
Tuesday, Halloween, I went witchy, with The Apprentice Witch by James Nicol.
Wednesday, I talked about Neil Gaiman’s eerie The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Friday is the end of the quarter, and a day without students so we can write progress reports. That meant that my last book talk was on Thursday, when I talked about How to Catch a Bogle by Catherine Jinks.
Looking through the archives of this blog, I realize I’ve never written about Catherine Jinks’ Bogle books. Well, the last book, The Last Bogler, is now out,
so it is about time I talk about the series, which opened with How to Catch a Bogle.
Which was followed by A Plague of Bogles.
The three-part series is sort of a Ghostbusters set in Dickensian England. In the first book, we meet Birdie McAdam, a ten-year-old orphan, who is proud of her job as apprentice to Alfred the Bogler, a man who catches monsters for a living. Birdie lures the bogles out of their lairs with her sweet songs, and Alfred kills them before they kill her. On the mean streets of Victorian England, hunting bogles is actually less dangerous work than mudlarking for scraps along the vile river Thames. Or so it seems—until the orphans of London start to disappear . Book two focuses more on Jem Barabary, a minor character in the first book. According to descriptions, book three centers on Ned Roach who becomes a bogler’s apprentice, and works with Birdie, Jem and Alfred to rid London of bogles once and for all.
As I was looking for pictures of the books, I learned that the Bogle series is known as the City of Orphans series elsewhere in the world and the book also have different titles (A Very Unusual Pursuit, A Very Peculiar Plague, and A Very Singular Guild) with very different covers.
No matter where you live or what they are called, this is a fun series that upper elementary readers will enjoy.
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