William MayneRecensioner

enjoyed this story a lot, a time-slip tale between contemporary Scotland and the Jacobite rising. There is a particularly gruesome school assembly scene.½

Irena's

Just as quirky and surprising and the first Hob story...but with that familiar way Hob has for comfort. This story was nearly bewitching with it's magical foreboding...and the final "nemesis" turns out not to be at all monsterous, just a loving bond.

A fantastic combo of clear innocence and creepiness!

Meh, outdated.

This is an anthology of stories about heroes from history (such as Roland) and mythology (such as Finn MacCool). They are beautifully told.

However, rather than talking "down" to children, the collection does err somewhat in the opposite direction: some extreme violence, present in the original tales, is casually included in these retellings. Whilst tame for an adult reader, it horrified my 7 year old self.½

A strange book. It takes place in a vaguely historical and vaguely unplaceable European setting - the sort of countryside that features in the tales of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen - and in some respects it resembles a fairy tale, beginning with a boy whisked from a church steeple by an eagle to fulfil a quest. But despite this fairytale element, the narrative itself is simultaneously realistic and fantastic. What would it actually be like for the fairytale hero dropped into an eagle's nest: vertiginous, smelly, and full of aggressive baby eagles with sharp beaks? If a boy must live with the eagles, what can he do for wings? This semi-realism does require quite of lot of suspension of disbelief, but despite the sheer oddity of the premise, I enjoyed the book.
MB 19-iv-2021

An American Indian girl, living on the edge of a European settlers' village, somewhere in 19th-century northern North America, takes a white boy out for a walk along the lakeside to glimpse a bear as it emerges from hibernation, but they are caught out by the spring thaw and drift off on an ice floe. He is, of course, completely incompetent at survival, but after she has started to show him that they can survive together, they encounter two adult Indian women and, fearing sudden death as an outcaste, she flees, leaving him to be captured. The subsequent trek, with mysterious bears and wolves in the forest, and an increasing trust between the boy and his captors, is told from his point of view almost to the end before we track back to find out what had happened to the girl. I enjoyed this. MB 19-iv-2021

The book was an early introduction to dialect. In this case probably written as accurately as the places the story takes place in, and the names which have been changed but remain totally authentic and in keeping. Despite the name changes, these days it is easy to find more or less exactly where it is set - but it is so vividly written that there is no need to do a tour on the ordinance survey or google maps - I already feel I know the place. The solid reality of the real world allows the supernatural to build convincingly, tricking the mind to allow you to cross from the mundane to the fantastical, effortlessly.

50 years after first reading this I have only just discovered that William Mayne wrote two more books and called the trilogy the jingle stones. I have ordered the next books with trepidation as they cannot live up to this one.

A good finish to the trilogy started with Earthfasts, better than the middle book. I do like dialect, especially mixed with aged english and I hope it is well researched and authentic. Sad that the author's private life has meant that all his work is shadowed. Sadder still that he caused harm to young people.

More difficult to follow than Earthfasts and not such a satisfying tale. I had to re-read again as soon as I reached the end to grasp the tail/tale. But full of dialects, thoughts, hopes, feelings, motives, connections. I may grow into it given time. And I shall try and pause before reading Candlefasts although it's a great temptation to go on reading.

One of my favourite books over more than 40 years. I still love the way it can take me into a place of menace and danger and cheer my heart as well as chilling it.

What an odd book. Que libro extrano. It came free with another book that I ordered from a lovely second hand bookshop in Fakenham. The characters range from about year 10 to 6th form with a younger sister tagged on. Apart from the main boy David, the author does not penetrate the inner life of them at all. Written the year I was born when the author was 28 and I wish I had not looked up his date of birth as I have just this moment (as in after I started this sentence) discovered he was convicted and imprisoned in 2004 for two and a half years for sexual offences against young female fans. Bit of a shock - I have only read 3 of his books until recently but Earthfasts is one of my favourites.

This book is a wet (as in marsh) dream of a man putting together fragments of his teens with sexual awakenings completely suppressed leaving the boys spouting Coleridge, doing 4 part singing (the author was at choir school from age 10 to 17) and very handy with practical skills, but emotionally stuck around age 8 or 9. The sister is demoted to a mental age of around 4.

I think I might wrap up with the 3rd of the Earthfasts trilogy but not be tempted any further.

The Hill Road is a challenging read. Not your usual time travel story. I was confused throughout, but that seemed appropriate since the characters were also lost. I'm not sure I totally understood the message the author was trying to convey. Maybe it warrants another go. Not right now though too many on my list. This is an author whose work I admire, but whose life is troubling. I'm making my way through all of his work slowly but surely. His past has made many of his titles nearly impossible to find despite his having won the Carnegie Medal for Children's Literature and being called the best English writer of Children's books of the 20th century.

A Puffin Original

Good writing, a bit fantastical. I found this to be a difficult story to follow. I'm not sure where it goes from here. The characters were very real and complete. I didn't really like the main character. I was glad that she seemed to learn the error of her ways, but I found her quite tiresome for a long time.

Mayne depicts a realistic, chaotic, ordinary family coping with a brain damaged and deaf oldest child, now an adult but full of childlike fears and understanding very little. They find a place for him working on a canal barge. He does well, aside from his little quirks such as taking his pay in cash and throwing away the paper money -- Gideon has no use for paper -- until the end of the tourist season throws him into a complete tailspin. Where did his job go?

I found the end of the book puzzling. Gideon runs away, spends a night outside in the rain, and is brought back deathly ill. His mother insists on keeping him at home because she doesn't want him to die in hospital. He lies unconscious for several days and wakes up able to hear again. I can't imagine deafness working like that, but perhaps Mayne wanted the book to end with a change in Gideon's life.

Two recurring themes in Mayne's work appear here: History is everywhere. Legends may be true.

When my children were small, my mother gave them this book as a gift. I recall we all loved reading it, but as often happens, it got lost somewhere, sometime over the years. So I was very pleased to get the opportunity to reread and re-love the story of Tabby and her patchwork quilt bed, and to enjoy the wonderful illustrations. A keeper.

This book has a rather unique premise: a young boy refuses to go to school and instead climbs up to the church steeple, where his father is working on the roof. He is snatched by a golden eagle which carries him off to an aerie on the mountainside. There the boy is raised alongside the eagle chicks. It is a very uncomfortable life, needless to say. Several times he fears he will die. But gradually he adapts to his new situation, learns to stand his own against the aggressive eaglets, and starts to understand the eagles' communication. It turns out they abducted him for a very specific purpose: they have a mission only he can carry out, to rescue a special egg that was stolen. But first they have to teach him to fly.

It's rather weird and delightful all at the same time. At first I thought the dialog was rather stiff . . . But further into the story I began to appreciate how real the characters feel, how very human Antar's reactions to everything, and the odd situations just made it more interesting. I was really not at all sure how the story was going to end. It has a few unexpected turns near the end- in part caused by the fact that the eagles nest close to an active volcano... . . .

Aside from the moment when the adult eagles pushed the young ones off the nest to make them fly, the behavior of the wild raptors in this book felt very authentic. Well, overlooking the fact that they talk to each other, and have a leader, and send a boy to save a missing egg... . . . It was quite a nice mix of fantasy and naturalism, and I liked the writing style enough that I will be on the lookout for other books by this author.

from the Dogear Diary

Set in the years after the conclusion of Cradlefasts, when David and Keith and Nellie Jack John must work out the meaning of what exactly happened on the moor all those years ago. Whatever it was must come to a conclusion, and David’s young sister Liddy is at the heart of it ...

For a children’s book, this isn’t a particularly easy read, and you finish it having to think hard about what exactly had had happened. It’s difficult to say too much, without spoilers for the earlier books, but it’s a compelling conclusion to the trilogy.

Edited to add: discovered from reading this book that the word ’attercob’ was an old word for spider. Was racking my brains to think where I had heard this before: it’s how Bilbo teases the giant spiders in Mirkwood in The Hobbit.½

David is still damaged by the death of his mother and baby sister seven years’ previously. He doesn’t like to discuss it even with his best friend Keith. But then Clare appears, who says she is his sister: she’s the same age, and has the same birthday and knows things about him that only his sister would know. Surely, she must be wrong ...

As a sequel to Earthfasts this is quite a strange book. Whereas in the first book the supernatural elements came thick and fast, this is much more contemplative. The supernatural elements in the first book are still there, but much more normalised. Until nearer the end, it’s more about a boy coming to terms with the traumatic events that have happened in his life. Earthfasts was written and clearly set in the 1960’s, and in a small town in Yorkshire at that (swinging London it is not), while Cradlefast] was written thirty years later (1995) and is clearly set in that time period. In the internal chronology of the book only eighteen months has passed, which makes for some slightly strange juxtapositions. Some characters seem to belong rather more in the earlier time period, and don’t quite work in the updated one.½

It’s the Yorkshire Dales in the 1960’s and two friends are investigating a strange noise that seems to be coming from underground, from a newly formed mound in a field. Keith thought that the noise was badgers underground and David though that it might be an underground stream, but neither of them expected that it was the sound of a drum being played underground, and getting closer and closer to the surface. And neither did they expect that that drum was being played by a drummer boy of the eighteenth century, who had entered the tunnel under the local castle over two hundred years before, looking for the legendary treasure of King Arthur that was supposed to be buried underneath, and had not been heard of since. But Nellie Jack John, as he introduces himself, will not believe the time that has passed while he was underground, as to him it seems he was walking for less than half an hour, and is certainly ill equipped to deal with the twentieth century.

This is a reread of a book I had as I child, and I was surprised to find that while I remembered certain elements of it very well, I had forgotten other equally vivid elements. But Nellie Jack John’s appearance isn’t the only strange thing that happens. Standing stones start to move, (if they are actually standing stones at all), candles burn cold, and time itself seems to becoming more fluid. This is a very well written children’s book, a lot more literary perhaps than most, and it holds up well rereading it as an adult.

Before Rowling (Dobby the house elf even talks like Hob) and before Gaiman (old magic in the modern world, as in American Gods and The Graveyard Book) there was this snip of enchantment. Begins on a bus route in today's London, refers to Wales (cutch), ends with the implied reminder that evil can never be completely conquered, anywhere in the world. It can be read by anyone who likes slightly creepy magic with a modern family and a ancient curse... and the brave little creature who will manage to save them from the goblins, their children, and their King. The illustrations are silhouette-style drawings formed to the initial letter of each chapter - perfect fit for the subject, style, and structure of the book. What is likely to interest some readers a lot, and possibly turn off others, is the language - it's almost like word-play, almost like poetry, and utterly bewitching.

Well, um, *L*iterary. I guess. I got to page 50, 26%, and had to stop. It would be an odd child who would read this, and though it's better suited for adults who like enigmas and philosophy it's not likely to be noticed by them.