Alan Garner has become, through a relatively modest output, one of the most important writers for children since 1960. His work is carefully crafted, economic, and precise. His early works-- The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (1960), The M...

When Alan Garner was a child, he almost died three times. A very sickly boy, he suffered variously from spinal and cerebral meningitis, pleurisy, pneumonia, and diphtheria, at times so ill that he could neither speak nor move. It was on these occasions t...

In 1968 Alan Garner, defending his focus on the adolescent audience, asserted in "A Bit More Practice" that "This group of people is the most important of all, and selfishly, it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement." Yet...

On one level [The Owl Service] is a story of possession, in which accidents take on dual meanings and the Welsh landscape adds its own shut-in, brooding atmosphere. Alison's mother and Roger's father hope to consolidate their recent marriage and see their children making friends here in the valley. So quickly does the author establish these characters, particularly through subtly diversified class idiom, that you can see the stresses which will threaten the holiday hopes…. These stresse...

Around [the children in The Owl Service], growing out of the wild countryside, its heroic ancient legends and its recent grim past, is woven a fantasy as moving as any in the tradition of imaginative literature. For younger readers the plot is a sequence of curious happenings consequent upon the finding in the loft of dinner plates with an owl pattern. A mystery, an historical fable, the interacting of past and present and a grim, tragic element involving the relationship of parents and children evoke in ol...