It is Aunt Maria (pronounced Ma-rye-ah), eccentric and magic, that causes the mayhem in the novel. The events are written by Mig in a locked journal as she and her brother, Chris, and their mother decide to spend Easter holiday with their aunt. That was their first mistake. The second was believing that Mig and Chris' father was killed as his car careened off a bridge.
There's much to believe and question in Aunt Maria's house; for example, the afternoon-tea ladies, the Mrs. Urs, who sit around day after day in clone-like obedience to the old lady. Also, there are the children in the orphanage whose lack of countenance and animation suggest a strong influence on their psyche.When Chris disobeys Aunt Maria, he is turned into a wolf and his mother passes this off with the denial he ever came to Aunt Maria's at all. Obviously her mind is being worked on. Everyone, including the cat, seems to have been "taken over" - except for Mig, whom Aunt Maria calls Naomi, the name of her own daughter. Mig asserts her own will and teams up with a neighbor who suggests that there is much amiss in Cranbury-on-Sea. When they unearth a magician named Anthony Green, who has been buried for 20 years, the magic begins to seep out of demonic Aunt Maria and she ends up, "a little tiny old lady in a fox fur . . . sitting in a tiny little wheelchair . . . hard, like a toy."
Chris is restored to his normal outspoken self, Mother regains her memory of the terrible ordeal and Anthony Green makes the decision about the demise of Aunt Maria, "Most of you seem to favor punishment. Nothing is going to make her see she was wrong. And the only point of punishment is to make someone see the error of her ways. If they don't see it, then what you are doing to them is vengeance, not punishment . . . So I am not going to take revenge. I'm simply going to put her away quietly. She probably won't even realize I have . . . "
Jones has provided so much fun and fantasy with "Aunt Maria," which oozes with time warps, "stuff' in a box, incantations, clones and transformation. While Aunt Maria is an old pest openly, underneath she carries off the mystic without a hitch. She berates the children, makes their mother feel guilty and refuses to relinquish her hold on a whole village of folks who are under her spell.
There must be a part of the reader that pities Aunt Maria - after all she has lost her daughter, Naomi, who was turned into a wolf and shot by accident. But there's also a part that believes that even though Anthony Green got rid of the tiny figure of Aunt Maria on the magic box (" . . . he took the tiny figure of Aunt Maria in the wheelchair out of his pocket and balanced her on one half of the box. Then he gave the lot a push to send it gently floating away."). There is a strong possibility that she still may be in control.
Aunt Maria is too precious of a demonic character to gently float away. She'll return so we can enjoy the future clandestine escapades of Aunt Maria in Cranbury-on-Sea.