Aiken's works for adults and children share a strong sense, not always of horror, but of the potential for danger and evil. Although a happy ending is usually achieved in her juvenile publications, it is often at a price. The titular heroine of Is Underground (1993) discovers only one of the two young men she is seeking because the other, the king's son, is dead; the two youngsters in Midnight Is a Place (1974) experience the evils of child labor in England's nineteenth-century sweatshops. Even in the comic stories of Mortimer the talking raven, whose audience could include preschoolers, Mortimer and Arabel confront adults unsympathetic to the point of cruelty in some of their adventures. Nevertheless, the dominant impression left by Aiken's books--at least the juveniles--is not one of foreboding but of high spirits, laughter, and imagination. Her characters respond to loss not just with courage but with a touch of defiance, a high-spirited determination not only to surmount the obstacle but to enjoy the climb. Dido Twite and her younger sister, Is, from the Wolves Chronicles, are the most obvious examples, but the gutsy kid is an Aiken staple.
Another characteristic of the Aiken canon is craftsmanship.
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