I have just read again one of my very favorite children’s books, Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce, a book that like all the best children’s books can be read with a great deal of pleasure by adults. I know that I find new depths every time I read it.
It is a fantasy about a boy named Tom, who wants to spend the summer at home exploring his garden with his brother. But Peter has measles and Tom has to spend a lonely, boring summer with his uncle and aunt in their flat in an old house in the city, a house with no garden. One night when the clock in the hall strikes thirteen, Tom steps outside the house to find, not the alley with garbage cans of the daytime, but a beautiful garden, which appears again every night.
What else he finds the garden I will leave for you to discover in this powerful, mysterious book.
Tom’s Midnight Garden was awarded the Carnegie Medal for the best British children’s book of 1958, and it has become a classic. Here is what John Rowe Townsend, the distinguished historian of children’s literature, wrote:
Tom’s Midnight Garden is as near as any book I know to being perfect in its construction and writing, while satisfying as fantasy and a story about people. If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children’s literature since the last war, it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book.
~ Stan S
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