Secure A Copy Toms Midnight Garden Illustrated By Philippa Pearce Made Available In Text

this time I thought I had already added it to the shelf, This is a true children's classic, It is a beautiful, haunting evocative story of childhood, growing up, adulthood and old age, It's also unbearably sad, in a happy kind of way, if that makes sense, It's the story of life,

As a child and a teenager I used to have dreams about the Midnight garden, so did last night,

The story is about how two lonely children a liitle boy named Tom and a little girl named Hattie found each other's worlds and shared their lives.
The ending never fails to move me to tears, I recommend it highly. I was surprised finding myself that I really liked this book, This is myth book this year and just mynd children's fiction, If this were not one of the children's books in the sitelinkMust Read Books, I would not have picked this up,

Time Slip is used brilliantly in the plot that you don't know between the two main characters, Tom or Hatty, is the ghost and who is a real human being.
To give you an example, in the movie Sixth Sense, you know right away who are the ghosts because the boy character says "I see dead people.
" Here, at first, I thought Hatty was clearly the ghost until she described Tom and then I did not know anymore, Then in the end, there is another surprise but I will not tell you what as I do not want to spoil your reading,

The final scene is the most heartwarming and moving scene in a children's book that I've so far encountered.
Prior to this, my most moving scene was in the book sitelinkCharlotte's Webspecifically when the many baby spiders appear in the barn one morning while Charlotte the lady spider is explaining to Wilbur the pig the passing of time.
The difference between the two is that the characters in this book, Tom and the elderly Hatty, are real people so it is easy to identify with them.
They don't talk about anything profound like Charlotte and Wilbur but the revelation is so gripping that would not think that this book was published during the time when your parents were probably not born yet.


The grandfather's clock ringing on theth hour is for me very imaginative, The ice skater reminded me of the movie Somewhere in Time, There are so many memorable elements in this book that had Pearce only used more complex language, this book could be for adults and maybe classified as either a book under scifi or horror genres or maybe a fusion of those.
Or throw in a love story between Tom and Hatty and this could be good material for a romantic movie,

Intelligent writing. Innovative plot. Immensely imaginative. Why is it that I am only reading these beautiful children's books now that I am past the midpoint of my life here on earth

Mind you, don't underestimate the children's books.
Sometimes, they are even more complex and engaging than other popular bestsellers written with adult readers in mind,

English manor homes seem to inspire a certain kind of time travel story, They are usually dream like and include a friendship across the ages, The only caveat, the protagonist from the present is usually unable to alter past events, Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce fits perfectly in this category and it's one of my favorite examples,

Tom Long, the present day that being probably thes protagonist is sent away to his aunt and uncle's flat while his brother recovers at home from the measles.
The flat, of course, was once a manor house and has sometime in the last fifty years been dived up into apartments, The only clue to the house's history is an old grandfather clock that keeps perfect time but chimes at random,

The clock is also the key for Tom to travel back in time to the Victorian era where he meets a girl about his age named Hatty Harriet Melbourne.
As the summer progresses, Hatty grows up, Tom's goal during his short stay with his aunt and uncle is to learn the secret of the clock and to find out what happened to his friend Hatty.


Tom's Midnight Garden is a short but extremely satisfying novel, It is tightly plotted and populated with interesting and believable characters, When the book ended I was both happy to have enjoyed the book and sad to say goodbye to Tom and Hatty, Of course, I was partial to Hatty, having a Harriet of my own, But even without that personal connection, I would have loved the novel,

If you like this sort of time travel story, you might also enjoy:

A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley
The House on the Strand Daphne du Maurier
Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein Molly Dwyer review coming Novemberth
There was a discussion in one of the online book groups about this book.
I loved it as a youngster and had a hankering to read it again, so here I am,.stars. Enjoyable magical fun! Somewhat on the slower paced side however, Poor Tom, forced to go away during the summer holiday while his brother suffers the measles, and kept indoors under quarantine, How oldfashioned is that Between Tom's unattractive sulking and insomnia, my general lack of interest in gardening, and a personal fear that this was going to turn into one of those stories about a guy finding the perfect mate by traveling back to a time before feminism, well, I didn't have high hopes.
But

it turned out to be a story about falling in love with a place, instead of a person, That I enjoyed very much,.STARS.

A truly magical story, entertaining for kids and adults alike, The beauty of this book is how you can allow your imagination to run away with you, just as Tom does, I will for sure pass this story probably this exact book because THAT COVER THOUGH and it has cute illustrations onto my kids as I think it's a great classic kids story.


I know this story well, I had the audio book on tape yes tape, I am, kids when I was a little girl but it was an abridged radioplay dramatization style so it was such a luxury to be able to actually read the words, as if for the first time again.
It was a great nostalgia trip and I found myself feeling the tension I felt when I was tiny, WISHING Tom to go back to the garden and other such spoilery things.
A true delight, if you're a grown up like me, pick it up, read it, love it and hang onto it for your kids,

I knocked of,of a star because THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SERIES, Imagine it, Tom spending entire summers there, growing up and still going back, maybe falling in love in the garden! I'm thinking a Narnia/Famous Five vibe.
This story is SO good that I'm rating it down for only beingpages long, . . Also Aunt Gwen is SO annoying and whiny so yeah,off.

This book is guaranteed to put a smile on your face, I read this bookyears ago, and it still haunts me,

Tom is forced to stay with aunt and uncle for the holidays, He hates the "nogarden"ness of their city flat, and a cranky old landlady who lives in the attic, One night, the old grandfather clock downstairs struck, Tom is led to open the back door, and he finds a blooming and live garden, which he learns later isn't there during the daytime.


In the garden world, time stood still for him, He befriends Hattie, a girl as lonely as he is, But why is time skipping each night he visits there Sometimes it's summer, sometimes it's winter, sometimes Hattie is very young, sometimes she is nearly a young woman.


After reading the summary above, maybe you think this is a ghost story, At first that's what I thought, but it turns out to be not like that, What I love about this book is how time and reality all seemed just a blur, The author weaves Tom's daylife with his life in the midnightgarden deftly, In his daylife, Tom struggled to find the explanation to the garden, Things are going bad to his mind when his stay at his aunt and uncle is nearly over, and he found he didn't want to leave the midnightgarden, nor let it change.


Carnegie Medal WinnerDid I just cry through the entire admittedly short last chapter of a children's book Seriously

OK, let's get the preliminaries out of the way first.
This is very much a period piece and, for better or worse, and I can't imagine my now grown kids having got through this, . . or, for that matter, sitting through the first few chapters of the book, even if someone was reading it to them, For kids who grew up with or, even more so, traveled with video games and video game consoles and DVD players or VCR's and, yes, the Internet, well,.
. . it's a bridge too far, And, sure, my kids are and were very much urban/suburbanites, . . so the fascination and satisfaction with or interest in a garden, . . just doesn't resonate . But, ultimately, that's just the by today's standards, painfully slow opening gambit,

Also, this is no Time Traveler's Wife, a personal favorite, even though that was the book that kept popping into my mind as I read this.
Obviously, it's a children's book as noted above, it's extremely dated I must admit, I didn't love the prose by modern standards, it's heavy and stilted and.
. . not just British, but formal/stuffy to the point of distraction,

But but but if you can get through the first third which, I admit, was more plodding and offputting than I expected, it slowly starts to grow on you.
And it's worth it, because, . . it's a slender volume again, it was written for kids, so as you get towards the final portions, the mosaic starts to assemble, and the heart of the piece begins to expose itself.
And the end, well, as predictable as it is OK, OK, it was written for kids, not adult sleuths raised on a broad range and healthy diet of whodunits.
. . is sublime precious touching appropriate ultimately, very nicely done.

In any event, this was a book I'd been hearing about, . . forever . Many authors refer back to it for a host of reasons, . . and many describe it as a formative work although, frankly, others suggest the hype even at the time was overrated, so I finally got my hands on a copy.
I have a hard time grasping how it became so popular in the's and's, but kid's books and literature were different, It is what it is, Nor do I have any recollection of my parents reading it to me, . . or reading it myself . Nor have I seen any of the three!! BBC adaptations, the movie, or the stage performance, But here's my point: this clearly resonated with an entire generation of Brits and plenty of others as well, regardless of how it stood the test of time,

Random observation: It's kind of funny reading this in, when sadly, inexplicably, maddeningly a significant segment of our society seems willing to tolerate if not facilitate the return of measles to the public consciousness.
I'm guessing that until the news stories of the recent outbreaks my kids had never given a moment's thought to measles, didn't know anyone other than their parents, of course who had contracted measles, or could envision the concept of family separation or isolation due to measles quarantine.
But who knows Maybe and I fervently hope this is not the case, the next generation will be more familiar, sympathetic, and empathetic to kids with measles as the disease again gains traction and returns to the mainstream.
Alas. .