Peter Dickinson's three books about the 'Changes', which cause the people of England to turn against machinery and withdraw into a dark age of malicious ignorance, appeared at almost the same time as [John Christopher's 'White Mountains' trilogy]…. Peter Dickinson is even farther from the SF mainstream than John Christopher. In the first book to appear, [The Weathermonger, Geoffrey] and his sister Sally set off through hostile countryside in a splendid antique Rolls-Royce from the Beaulieu motor museum to find the cause of the Changes. This part of the book is a vivid adventure story, and the passages in which the hero practises his mysterious art of conjuring up a different weather are fine and poetic, but the book comes a sorry tumble in the end with its incongruous attribution of the Changes to a revived but drug-sick Merlin. (p. 216)
The second book, Heartsease …, moves back in time from The Weathermonger. Two children, using horses and an old tugboat, contrive the escape of a young man who has been stoned as a witch and left for death. This is the most unified, most consistently gripping, and for my money the best book of the trio. Finally, The Devil's Children … goes back to the beginning of the Changes…. The fact that the three books were written in reverse order to the events they describe emphasizes that they are three linked stories and not, like the 'White Mountains' three, a true trilogy. This does not in itself detract from their merits, but it was possible to feel after The Devil's Children appeared that the author's obvious inventive and storytelling abilities had not quite produced the achievement they might have done. (p. 217)
John Rowe Townsend, in his Written for Children: An Outline of English-Language Children's Literature (copyright © 1965, 1974 by John Rowe Townsend: reprinted by permission of J. B. Lippincott Company; in Canada by Kestrel Books), revised edition, Lippincott, 1974.
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