Luckily, Samantha discovers a furry, blue-eyed creature living in the cellar: a bogwoppit, once believed to be extinct. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Their relationship gets off to a shaky start, made all the more precarious by the unexpected appearance in the kitchen of a curious wide-eyed creature with a long furry tale, feathered wings and two webbed feet. Shirley Hughes has created some beautiful illustrations to accompany the text which really enhances the story, and I loved repeatedly reading this tale of an ordinary girl who has an extraordinary adventure and ends up with everything she ever wanted. But found, as ever with Williams' books, that the books have an old-fashionedness of the very worst kind, the casual disrespect for anyone who is not English speaking, white, middle class kind. The way the relationship develops between these two spiky and independent characters, who we can see are lonely and actually need each other, is fun to read and I think all children secretly dream of being able to speak to adults the way Samantha does and getting away with it!

She certainly is not wanted when her aunt gets married and wants to move to America, so she gets palmed off on yet another aunt, who wants her even less. These drawings are not cutesy, but the pictures of Samantha are excellent and portray the complex person in the story very well indeed.

I have been looking for this book for years because I LOVED it as a child, but it's always out of print. I would have preferred more about the old house and garden, and less about the bogwoppits, who are unpleasant and stinky, but it a child who enjoys all the magical creature books around today were to somehow come across it, they might like the bogwoppits much more than I did. The story is interesting, I remember being gripped by it as a kid, and with a group of my friends, because it has more tragedy in it than most books for kids that age, and yet it's fun, quirky, and has so many things in it that you want in a story at that age. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.With a new foreword and the original drawings by Shirley Hughes, it’s a great pleasure to see this title by a gifted storyteller back in print. The antisocial aunt lives in a mansion in a park, and absolutely does not want the girl staying there.

It immediately sold out but disappeared until re-issued in abridged form by Kaye Webb at Puffin Books twenty years later, when it became a best-seller. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.The last thing she wants is the responsibility of her brash niece, but Samantha isn’t taking no for an answer, and they are going to have to learn how to rub along together. Her classic stories often involved brave creatures who overcome trials and cruelty in the outside world before finding a loving home. Lucky for Samantha, then, to discover the small, furry creature living in the cellar; a bogwoppit - believed extinct - up till now.