[Tom's Midnight Garden is] the perfect fantasy of our time…. This deeply moving, beautifully written and completely convincing time-fantasy is one of the most perfectly conceived and executed children's books of the past twenty years. (p. 128)

The author makes beautifully subtle and complex use of [the] time-shift….

Such a story in other hands could be mawkish and unconvincing, just another time fantasy. In Philippa Pearce's it becomes almost unbearably moving. A wonderful book…. (p. 130)

Although it is typical of the author's highly individual outlook that the social problem [in Minnow on the Say] should be turned upside down and it is the bus driver's family that leads the happy, secure and well-fed life, while the upper class family is in difficulties, this is not a 'social consciousness' novel. It is a straightforward adventure story, with a long-sustained search for buried treasure by the river; a moderately nasty villain...