Philippa Pearce entwines realistic and imaginary landscapes and characters to create some of the most memorable fantasy of modern times. Her prevalent theme of the importance of friendship is explored through believable adventure plots. Secrets--happy,...

STRETCHING EASTWARD from the small English university town of Cambridge is a flat landscape that looks at first sight bleak. This is the fen country of East Anglia. You need to move through it quietly for a while before your eyes adjust to a...

Last winter in Vancouver we experienced several serious windstorms. We lost thousands of trees in Stanley Park, the backyard of my childhood. Fallen hemlocks, their giant tangles of roots ripped from the ground, exposed to light and scrutiny. Broken cedars, their raw, ragged...

Minnow on the Say employs a familiar formula for a children's book—the successful search for a long-buried treasure, with its usual attendant props, the false clues, villain racing to beat the children in their quest, etc. If the book were no more than this it would scarcely be worth writing about but it is however an unusual book in many respects; and it is worth noting that none of the subsequent novels employs such a well-tried device. The main characters—Adam, David and Miss Codling...

Ghost stories, especially those which concentrate on the relationship between a single person and his ghost, as in the work of Philippa Pearce, are anti-fatalist. The person and the event are singular and positive, but they are shadowed by their negatives, which are many—all the people we might have become, and did not; all the things we might have done, and did not. The richness of our lives and being is in the depth of their shading. This perception lies behind the title story of The Shadow Cage, P...

Beneath [the top tune of the plot of The Battle of Bubble and Squeak] are played variations on the themes of family relationships, developing independence in children, the learning of social give-and-take, and the urgency of emotional desires and compulsions. It's not hard to see resemblances between this story and the author's earlier novel A Dog So Small…. A boy's desire for a pet, his distress at not being allowed one, a family living on an ordinary housing estate, an act of e...