Scholastic don't seem to publicise the audiobooks much, so even I tend to forget about them. I read Fever Crumb myself, but it wasn't an experience that I felt inclined to repeat, so I was delighted when they suggested Jenny Agutter as the reader for A Web of Air; she has a lovely voice, and adds a distinct touch of class to Fever's adventures. She'll be familiar to most people of my age from such films as Logan's Run and An American Werewolf in London, and a lot of English men seem to have a soft spot for her after seeing Walkabout at an impressionable age. I didn't catch that one until quite recently, but I remember being very taken with her in the children's classic The Railway Children when I was seven or eight...
The Railway Children has also been on my mind for another reason lately. I've been worrying about which films I should let Sam watch and which ones might give him nightmares, and thinking how hard it is predict the things which an individual child may find frightening. One of the scenes which scared me most as a little boy was this. It contains no monsters, no menace, nothing that would make the British Board of Film Censors award it anything stronger than a U certificate - and yet even now I find it peculiarly unsettling. Landscape on the move!
(Shudder!)
The audio version of A Web of Air is available here, or from wherever you usually get your audiobooks, I guess...
