Alan Garner's stories, The Stone Book and Tom Fobble's Day, are not poems but they have the overtones, the power to stir and engage the imagination, which we expect from poetry…. The simplicity of Tom Fobble's Day is a matter of uncomplicated syntax and a direct, concrete vocabulary. At the most obvious level this suits a story of one winter day in which a boy whose sledge is Tom Fobbled [a ritual borrowing] and then broken, visits his grandfather, the local "whitesmith an...

The order in which the stories of Alan Garner's quartet appear may confuse those who like their genealogies well ordered. But the young should be encouraged to read them as soon as they appear. Like memories, they are reworked in the head after their impact as events. The Stone Book is still for me the foundation of a literary experience of great power. Tom Fobble's Day and Granny Reardun keep the clarity and precision, particularly of time, place and persons…. Garner has made his text ...

Expect a lot, and you won't be expecting too much, of The Stone Book by Alan Garner…. It is a miniature masterwork and, like all great miniatures, is staggering in what its limits contain…. [It] re-establishes the boundaries of what can be done in the pre-novel form, and it shows Garner to be totally in command of his art. The prose is assured, precisely right, without flaw; the story itself has an emotional poise that up till now has not been present in Garner's writing.

Rarely have I been more moved by a story [The Stone Book] and the telling of it. To hold a class—any age—absolutely spellbound you read the passage where Mary climbs the church steeple to the top where her father, a stonemason, sets the weathercock and she swings round on it. Mary's lesson lies under the landscape she sees from the spire, in the stone quarry. She learns from men moulded by their craft. The language is like the theme, hewn out of the wisdom of use. A quite remarkable boo...

The Stone Book is rich with detail of the stonemason's craft and with the eloquent dialect of its Cheshire setting. But, unlike the stone which is its theme, this is a bleak, austere story; one may admire the precise style and even the self-conscious parade of unfamiliar vocabulary, but one remains unmoved by the characters and their preoccupations. Lance Salway, "Little Boy Found," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1976; reproduced f...