When Meriam Eskin, called Merrie, is taken from her home in Malaya by her English father, the six-year-old girl bitterly resents being parted from her mother, and the only home she has ever known. Placed in the care of her great-aunt Emma in England, Merrie makes friends with a local "hermit" named Giller, and slowly begins to adapt to her new life. But her bitterness towards her father does not abate, and her sense of estrangement from her surroundings, the differences between herself and those around her, lead her to behave in a difficult and prickly manner, causing her father's new Norwegian fiancee Bergit to christen her the "little dark thorn."

Ruth M. Arthur delivers another compelling tale of a young girl's struggle to find her rightful place in the world in The Little Dark Thorn. Her sensitive portrayal of a young girl with a mixed racial and cultural heritage, her understanding of the simultaneous love and hatred a child might feel for her parent, and her convincing portrait of a difficult maturing process, all come seamlessly together in this young adult novel - sadly out-of-print (along with the rest of Arthur's work). Together with the earlier My Daughter, Nicola, this work is one of the few Arthur novels to contain no supernatural element, but whether Arthur uses the supernatural or not, her stories always have a magical quality.

Like many of Arthur's works, this is illustrated by the marvelous Margery Gill. ( )