The Mysterious Howling

This was delightful! As an adult this is the exact type of children's lit I like to read, but I do believe I would have enjoyed it when I was a child as well.

The narrator is very entertaining, Penelope is quite intelligent though also very sheltered/naive too (in the best way) and the children are adorable! Also I listened to this on audiobook and the woman who preformed it, Katherine Kellgrin, was a excellent! Highly recommend it!

Loved the way it ended on a mystery as well and can't wait to pick up the second one.

Absolutely love it! :-D

15 years old Penelope becomes the governess to three lovely wolf-children. She is amazing at her job and it's not damaged by the fact that the children are like wolves, kind, obedient, intelligent and curious. Willing to please her, whom they take as the pack leader and surrogate mother.
I love her attitude toward the children - assuming they are intelligent human beings, but using some communication skills she learned from working with an animal trainer, understanding that that is the way the children were raised... I am autistic, and I wish people spend more time trying to figure out new ways of communicating instead of trying to force people to communicate the way they do. :-(
The book ends with some foreshadowing, and this time, because I happen to know at least some things coming, I'm not upset because of the closeness to the edge of the cliff. It's not really a cliffhanger, but there is most certainly enough questions to make me want to read the next book immediately!

I love these characters! Even the villains are enjoyable, even though thoroughly unlikable :-D
I love the story, I love her writing and - I suppose if there were any negatives to talk about, some details that just don't fit the time. Nothing that irritates, though.

This story is a real let-down. And not too much actually happens. First of all, the “mysterious howling” of the title is only mentioned in the final chapter and left mysterious (this book is the first in a series). Is it too much to ask to tell a complete story in one book? I have read several other series for children that manage to do this. But this one is one tedious set-up. In this story the main character is a 15-year-old orphan turned governess for three younger children supposedly raised by wolves. I found the vocabulary within to be much too sophisticated at times. Here are a few of the words and phrases that appear in this story:

toilette, inexorably, botanical, apropos, solvent, behavioral psychology, Baroque sensibility, alma mater, eloquence, rustic, summons, reverie, distraught, enigmatic, inscrutable

Inscrutable, indeed. And yet when I finished reading the story and asked my kids what they thought, my eldest (aged 10) replied, “Awesome” and my youngest (aged 7) wanted to know what the next book in the series was called. I'm beginning to suspect my kids just enjoy being read to, period. (It also affords my 7-year-old an opportunity to climb into my lap.) I was often quite bored by this tale and did not find it clever in the slightest. I've read the first four of the Lemony Snicket books and they don't compare at all.