In The Unreluctant Years, Lillian H. Smith says "that a new book's claim to stand beside a well-loved favorite rests in the degree to which it possesses the magic of a Lewis Carroll or a Stevenson or a Mark Twain."
With what infinite certainty do we realize in Mayne's books that children do things 'with blitheness,' are endlessly searching for lasting truth, and in the process, reveal to us the heart of the matter. "The eager, reaching, elusive spirit of childhood is here. It has its own far horizons and a friendly and familiar acquaintance with miracle." It is because of this quality, which is innate in the books of William Mayne, that we cannot fail to recognize his universality, his disarming truth, his power to re-create for us the essence of the heart of a child, by the strength of his expression and insight into the ways they think and act. This power makes us all renew within ourselves—if for a short time only, the inexpressible things of that rare and fleeting receptive time that was our own childhood. In his studies of children, he is able to express for us their essential thought-workings, projected as they are, from imaginative conception into real adventure. The children think things out before us and act in accordance with intensity and feeling. Everything is real to them and has meaning. Because we can read about ideas as they are being crystallized into action for us through the eagerness of vision that only a child can have, we too are able to draw on inner capacities and can give ourselves, the readers, a rare treat. We are able to feel safe again, in a world which is true, where there are no conventions, and no delusions. They rediscover for us a kind of symbol of the eternal, and the intensity of our pleasure in being able to recapture it, is real indeed.
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