SuitabookEscape to Witch Mountain
Alexander Key
- Reading
- Read in short instalments if suspense is engaging, pausing after cliffhangers to discuss choices rather than simply predicting escape. Afterwards, compare the book’s ideas about difference with its portrayal of political opponents.
- Themes
- Family loyalty and belonging: Tony and Tia remain connected while displaced from familiar care and searching for their origins. The book presents this favourably.
- Difference and social suspicion: The children’s unusual abilities attract attention and make them vulnerable to fear, curiosity, exploitation or attempts to define them. The book takes a critical view of this.
- Protection, authority and control: The siblings encounter adults who may help, exploit, capture or misunderstand them while they are dependent and on the run. The book makes uncertainty about adult motives part of the suspense and raises questions about the difference between care and the desire to control.
- Worth knowing
- Prepare for bereavement, institutional care, pursuit and adults whose motives are uncertain. The treatment of difference is serious rather than simply celebratory; some political stereotyping in the ending may merit contextual discussion.