Many of us read Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase or Arabel’s Raven as children, but she also wrote a host of novels for adults.  The Embroidered Sunset shares the same sensibility as her children’s books, namely, Dickensian villains with no good qualities, crazy side characters who speak in rhymes and break out in song, and a habit of wrapping up the plot in wholesale destruction (for instance, blowing up a castle in Black Hearts in Battersea, attempting to make a cannon so powerful […]