Often working with fairy tale motifs, Mahy delights in the use of witches, ghosts, and dragons, especially in much of her early work for all ages. In Mahy's competent hands such spirits are not always meant to frighten as they do in her novel Dangerous Spaces, but also to enlighten, as does the specter in The Haunting. Such award-winning tales have made Mahy well known around the globe. Her worlds of surprising possibilities are familiar to children and also strike chords of remembrance with adults. When writing about aliens with unusual powers, intelligent adolescents, or New Zealand, Mahy "writes with all the force and precision and richness of a poet," according to Elizabeth Ward in the Washington Post Book World.
From Librarian to Author
Born in the small New Zealand town of Whakatane in 1936, Mahy grew up loving stories of all sorts, the ones she created for her own amusement as much as the ones read to her. "In the beginning, before I could write," Mahy recalled in Children's Books and Their Creators, "I made up small rhymes which I learned by heart, and acted out stories, vaguely based on events in my own life but filled with the fascinations of another sort of existence.
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