ARMITAGE, ARMITAGE, FLY AWAY HOME

If an inventive author jotted ideas (for eccentrics, spirits and sorcerers, settings, situations) on index cards and dealt them out indiscriminately into ten piles, the result might resemble Armitage: only the presence of Harriet and Mark and their parents ties the stories together and only the expectation of the unexpected binds them internally. Take "Harriet's Hairloom": on her thirteenth birthday, Harriet is shown into the Closed Room (an unexplained family tradition) which contains only a loom for weaving human hair that's never been cut (no explanation) so she posts an ad for same; concurrently the 6" sister of her 6" best friend (no explanation) disappears; concurrently Mark wins a complete bathroom in a soap contest and it is set up in an adjoining field. In answer to the ad, Thomas Jones the Druid arrives with the beard of his twin brother Dai Jones the Bard; he cut it off to assure himself of the inheritance promised to the brother with the longest beard on their ninetieth birthday, Midsummer Day. The resolution of this farrago can only be called midsummer madness, and so are most of the rest: there's no point, no consecutive plot, no conclusion. A shaggy ghost story.