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This book was recommended by Mortimer Adler in his book the Paideia Program (a book about educating children). I would say it is good for the 8-14 year old range. Of coure, I'm in my 30s and I loved it. I read it in 3 days.
This book is much better than the Harry Potter books (which I also just read). The author has put so much thought and emotion into this story.
As another reviewer mentioned the book "makes you sad in a good way". It is about friendship, loneliness, growing up, time travel, and family. I am still perplexed and mulling over some parts of this book.
I won't spoil the surprises by going over the plot. I recommend you read this to your children. If you do, you'll probably spend half the time discussing with them the nature of time and reality, what true friendship is, how wonderful nature is, and how mean some humans can be.
Does Harry Potter do this? Yes but in a much shallower, simpler way. This book makes you think and it doesn't let the magic (or whatever) get the hero out of a fix or solve the mystery. The magic creates the questions but never really answers them.
***This is NOT a book about wizards or witches. It is a book about a boy who has strange things happen to him that he cannot control and really cannot understand. So please don't buy this book thinking it is a wizard or boarding school book. I used Harry Potter as a comparison as it is a popular modern day children's book aimed at the same age range.***
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I am 42 and read this book as a child (in the UK), have read and re-read it since as well as to my own kids who are now 14 & 12 (here in the US) - and bought it for every single American child we have ever been to a birthday party for etc. I am MAD for this book and cannot impress upon anyone reading this review how amazing and other-worldly this book is - totally brilliant. I cannot understand why it isn't better known. Minnow on the Say is another super story for both children & grown-ups.
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I would say this is one of the best books on time travel. Although it's listed under children's books, I'm sure adults will enjoy it as well. If you haven't read this yet, you're missing out a lot.
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The book cover caught my attention when I was Ross University School of Medicine's student lounge. It looks like a book for little kids, since the book collections at student lounge is sparse; I just had to check it out. I love to read about super-natural stories. And I have to say this book is well done. It has all the necessary mystery and suspension.
Once I started reading, I just wanted to keep going till I find out what is really happening. I was a little disappointed that it is not really a ghost story. However, the author's imagination is beyond normal. Who can ever thought about such a scenario, and isn't it fun to let your imagination fly high and into the deep that you have never thought that was possible. Someone could have made a movie out from this book.
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'Tom's Midnight Garden' is Phillipa Pearce's award-winning novel, as well as her best work - all her other writings are measured by this, and so far none have quite reached its peak. It is a time-slip story, which means I was somewhat cross-eyed by the end of it (I usually avoid time-travelling adventures like the plauge on account of the 'confusing ordering' of them all), but Pearce keeps to all the laws of physics that would apply if one actually *could* time-travel. The real beauty of the story is not the time-travelling at all, but the realism of all the characters, the profound themes concerning the passage of time and growing up, the simple but true friendship between Tom and Hatty, and the idea of a secret garden, not separated from the rest of the world by a mere wall like in [...], but by Space and Time themselves.
Tom Long is being sent from his home and the promise of a long, lazy summer to his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen's dreary, boring flat, as his brother Peter has the measles. Frustrated and rude to begin with, he lives a confined and utterly restricted half-life within their cold and unwelcoming home. In fact, the only thing that proves that time is indeed moving at its normal pace is the ticking of the ancient grandfather clock belonging to old Mrs Bartholemew, the land-lady who lives upstairs. The clock keeps strange time however, often it gives more or less chimes than it's supposed to, and one night Tom is sure that he hears it chime the hour thirteen. Creeping downstairs to investigate, he discovers instead that the backdoor opens out into a beautiful, silent, vast garden. He soon becomes a regular visitor, but only by night, for in the daytime the door instead opens out onto a grimy yard. But in the garden he meets Hatty, a lonely little girl under the tyranny of her unkind aunt and three cousins, and the only being that can actually see him! After the friendship is made, the real adventures start, but threading through all of this is the continual mystery - how did the garden get there? Who is Hatty? Where did she and the garden come from? Are they ghosts or merely images from the past? *Why* is the garden there in the first place?
Pearce treats what is essentially her main character - the garden itself - not as a strange, utterly abnormal event, nor as a comfitable, familiar occurance, but as a ghostly, yet steady place. Tom's reactions to it, from his initial awe, to fright, to intoxication with it is vividly and realistically portrayed so that we too honestly share in these emotions.
It is fascinating to read of Tom's explorations of the garden and the twofold freedom he experiences - first that he is away from the regulations of his aunt and uncle, and second that of his invisibility to the denizens of the garden. Pearce creates beautiful descriptive passages of the garden and surrounding grounds, but marks them with intriguing sentences such as: 'Tom often had the feeling of people having just gone, and an uncomfortable feeling of someone who had *not* gone; someone who, unobserved, observed him. Pearce builds up the tension and in this story magnificently, as Tom gradually builds up his knowledge of the garden and slowly begins to traverse its borders.
Furthermore, Tom's decision to quit the real world to dwell forever within the 'garden-world' is a thought-provoking one, and coupled achingly well with Hatty's growth, movement into 'grown-up' things, and steady forgetting of Tom. The feelings of change and aging reminds me very much of stories concerning Peter Pan and Wendy, however in Barrie's book, where we predominatly see through Wendy's eyes, here we can see how Peter probably felt as an elusive and 'unreal' figure, loosing someone not through death or place but through the simple inevitability of growing up.
Thus the story is definitly not just for kids, as the major message of the book is a bittersweet one - that we must all someday leave our childhoods behind for the bigger realm of adulthood beyond our own backgardens. Yet we need never forget those times, nor loose the friendships we forged within them. Certainly Tom and Hatty didn't.
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