In addition, some stories have been translated into Russian, Chinese and Icelandic.įor her contributions to children's literature she was made a member of the Order of New Zealand.
Her novels have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Catalan and Afrikaans. Among her children's books, A Lion in the Meadow and The Seven Chinese Brothers and The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate are considered national classics. There have 100 children's books, 40 novels, and 20 collections of her stories published. Her books The Haunting and The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance both received the Carnegie Medal of the British Library Association. While the plots of many of her books have strong supernatural elements, her writing concentrates on the themes of human relationships and growing up. As the story unfolds, she comes to understand more about the complexities of life and love and sex and romance and happiness and sorrow in the grownup world on whose threshold she bides.Margaret Mahy was a well-known New Zealand author of children's and young adult books. Fourteen year old Laura copes with school, her three-year-old brother, her mother's job that doesn't pay very well so they're chronically short of money, and life after her parents' divorce. It's a good story, too, and a very fine coming-of-age tale.
It has a quality that I associate with Mark Helprin's, except toned down and blended in enough with more ordinary prose that it enhances, rather than dominates, the story being told. The style is reminiscent of Madeline L'Engle, maybe Lois Lowry or Edith Nesbitt. The plain language of the book's description doesn't do justice to the evocative language describing even the humdrum details of Laura's ordinary life in the outskirts of a city in New Zealand, even before magic starts to creep in round the edges.
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