Miss Pearce has … the storyteller's gift,… the novelist's power to create memorable people and the almost-architectural ability to complete a properly balanced and proportioned work. Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) is as near as any book I know to being perfect in its construction and writing, while satisfying also as fantasy and as a story about people. Only Philippa Pearce could have written it. (p. 246)
The book has a profound, mysterious sense of time; it has the beauty of a theorem but it is not abstract; it is sensuously as well as intellectually satisfying. The garden is so real that you have the scent of it in your nostrils….
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