5. Aunt Maria

Aunt Maria is a strange story, because throughout the whole beginning it feels like there's something big going on in the story. The author, Diana Wynne Jones makes it seem like it's a story of a family, who's father recently died, that goes on a trip to the father's Aunt's house. But while this situation plays out, there's a bunch of subtle hints that there's something wrong about the place. For example, the kids (who are the main characters) see the workers in the town the aunt is at as zombies And they see the kids in the orphanage as robots. Meanwhile the brother is finding a ghost in his room almost every night. The funny thing is that, although the logical part of my brain was telling me that Aunt Maria was behind a lot of these mysteries, I couldn't help wondering if some of the weird things that happened were just in the kid's imaginations. In that regard, Jones did a good job at conveying the
feeling of paranoia the kids were feeling.

What I found interesting was that there didn't seem to be any important guy characters in the story. And in the town, all the guys were zombie workers which is a funny yet interesting take on our society. The important people in the story was set up to be Aunt Maria and her other old, female friends.

The book has a mystery to it that I couldn't pin down.  With every few pages, it felt like a new mystery had been brought up to the table. Since I didn't finish the book, I couldn't figure out what connected everything. In all, it was a fun, goofy read.