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Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
Mar. 7th, 2023 04:59 pmTom’s Midnight Garden
3/5. A middle grade fantasy time travel from 1958. Tom is sent to his aunt and uncle’s city flat while his brother recovers from Measles. He thinks it’s terrible until he discovers that, when the clock strikes thirteen, he can find a wondrous garden out the back door, and a special playmate there.
Why is it that whenever I pick up a book I remember from childhood, it turns out it’s sad and I had no idea?
This isn’t tragic sad, just concerned with the wistfulness of time slipped away, and the chasm of understanding that can grow between children and adults. It’s also framing growing up as a kind of loss, and doing a little bit of that thing where romance and sexuality are a kind of inevitable threat, but more complexly than, oh I don’t know, just as a random example, the Narnia books.
I remembered how much fun they had playing in the garden and that’s about it, and now as an adult I read a book rich with overtones and subtext (the aunt and uncle are infertile, and she at least is really sad about it, which I super did not clock), oh and also, the religious imagery is doing a lot of work here which, you will be shocked, I also missed when I was eight.
Overall, a neat little speculative kids story that I was not sorry to revisit.
Content notes: Some sad orphan taken in into an unloving home stuff, the sort of views on gender you’d expect of a pre-pubescent boy of that era.
3/5. A middle grade fantasy time travel from 1958. Tom is sent to his aunt and uncle’s city flat while his brother recovers from Measles. He thinks it’s terrible until he discovers that, when the clock strikes thirteen, he can find a wondrous garden out the back door, and a special playmate there.
Why is it that whenever I pick up a book I remember from childhood, it turns out it’s sad and I had no idea?
This isn’t tragic sad, just concerned with the wistfulness of time slipped away, and the chasm of understanding that can grow between children and adults. It’s also framing growing up as a kind of loss, and doing a little bit of that thing where romance and sexuality are a kind of inevitable threat, but more complexly than, oh I don’t know, just as a random example, the Narnia books.
I remembered how much fun they had playing in the garden and that’s about it, and now as an adult I read a book rich with overtones and subtext (the aunt and uncle are infertile, and she at least is really sad about it, which I super did not clock), oh and also, the religious imagery is doing a lot of work here which, you will be shocked, I also missed when I was eight.
Overall, a neat little speculative kids story that I was not sorry to revisit.
Content notes: Some sad orphan taken in into an unloving home stuff, the sort of views on gender you’d expect of a pre-pubescent boy of that era.