Chapter Forty: Tales of the Willows Trilogy

This trilogy (The Willows in Winter, Toad Triumphant, and The Willows and Beyond) by William Horwood is a great extension of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.  He stays true to Grahame's Rat, Mole, Toad, Badger, and Otter, and his additional characters and expansion of Portly are delightful.  He also does a pretty good job of staying stylistically close to Grahame's prose in The Wind in the Willows, although a careful reader might notice some differences, and occasionally I detected a whiff of satire in Horwood's prose, although this was not necessarily a problem.  I absolutely love the additional adventures Horwood has created for these characters and the added emotional depth they assume over the course of this trilogy; I almost cried at points during the last book.  These are a great read for anyone who loves The Wind in the Willows and who wonders what might have happened to Ratty, Mole, Badger, Otter, and--of course--Toad after the end of Grahame's classic.