Kids' Stuff

Recently I brought back a few of the children's books from KL, those novels I acquired back in the UK in the middle eighties. I'm intending to find some way of giving these away to anyone who might like to read them as a way of getting a little more shelf space, and making the books useful again.

So far I've read four of them and to do so has been a reminder of the pleasures of this genre, but I can't honestly say any of them set me fire in quite the same way as first reading Leon Garfield, Jean Marks and Philip Pullman did, once upon a time. Mind you, A Parcel of Patterns by Jill Paton Walsh struck me as being brilliantly written in terms of being a convincing representation of someone writing in 1665. (It's about the plague village, Eyam.) But I saw it as entirely adult in its way, with none of the energy of a genuine book for a teenage audience.

There were a couple of novels by Berlie Doherty, who was just becoming a bit of a 'name' when I first got hold of them. But other than being well-told tales I didn't see much to fuss about - though I did enjoy their sense of place in the chilly north.

And the last of the four was really the odd one out, this being Phillipa Pearce's A Dog So Small. Coming from the writer of the stone cold classic Tom's Midnight Garden I thought this was a guaranteed treat, but it just didn't cohere somehow. I kept wondering why a friendly editor hadn't told her that the premise - the power of an imaginary dog on the workings of a boy's mind - was too strange to work. I can't imagine any kid of ten enjoying it, but this seems to be the age group she had in mind. But the great thing is that there was a time when something as off-beat as this had the support of a major publisher.