This middle grade book is a collection of four stories, each following a day in the life of a child living in Cheshire, England, and spanning four generations in the same family. There are clues in each story that link it to the next and/or previous ones and the connections are subtle and fairly clever. And so I feel that I should like this one more than I did. The idea is a good one, but sometimes it felt like I had to work much harder to figure out the linking clues than I really wanted to, which leads me to believe that some kiddos would miss them entirely and quickly would be lost. The Cheshire dialect was in parts a bit of a challenge as well. In the end, it falls into the largish bin of Books with Good Ideas but What Should Have Been Written By Neil Gaiman. ( )

The stone book quartet contains four short novels :

The Stone Book
Granny Reardun
The Aimer Gate
Tom Fobble’s Day

The stories tell four different stories, set in four different times in a rural part of Cheshire, England. The first is set in 1864, and the last in 1941. They all tell a story set in one day in the life of children, all of different generations of the same family.

The first, The Stone Book, is the story of Mary, who is bringing her father his “baggin” or lunch. He is a stone mason, working on the church spire. Mary is hoping that her mother has a boy soon because she is tired of “being a lad” and having to climb up the spire to help her father. But at the same time she enjoys the closeness with him.

Granny Reardun is the story of Mary’s son, Joseph. A Granny Reardun is a child raised by its granny instead of its mother. Possibly because he was illegitimate. Joseph has been helping his grandfather, but he knows he doesn’t want to work with stone.

The Aimer Gate tells the story of Robert, Joseph’s son, as a cornfield is harvested in the old way, with a team of men using scythes. He climbs up the spire of the local church and finds his own name engraved there. This, of course, is the his great-grandfather’s engraving, Mary’s father, Robert.

The last story, Tom Fobble’s Day, is named for a local tradition whereby any child can take another’s marbles by calling “Tom Fobbles” on Tom Fobble’s Day which seems to be the day after Easter. But the day in question is not Tom Fobbles day, but is in the middle of winter.

The stories are obviously linked because the concern different individuals of the same family, but they are also linked because they are about traditional crafts, customs, and skills. And the line that links all these different generations of the same family.

They are lovely stories. Garner writes so simply, and yet he never dumbs down. There are plenty of words that I’d never heard of before, but for the most part, you know what he is talking about because of the context, the “baggins” of the first story for example is obviously a traditional local word for lunch. And that use of unfamiliar words really works to help create a very distinctive atmosphere and setting.

In all his writings that I’ve read Garner is always concerned with place and how it can link a person to their whole family’s history. Garner himself was born in the place where his family had lived for years, he knows so much about that area because he has grown up with people who can trace their history back through generation after generation, each with stories and knowledge about that particular place. That idea that a place can own a person and a person can own a place.

There was a line and he could feel it. It was a line through hand and eye, block, forge and loom to the hill. He owned them all: and they owned him.

I’m pretty sure there must be an illustrated version of these stories out there, I must go investigate at some point, because I think these are stories that can be revisited time and again, probably offering more on a reread. When I have the time I’d love to read some books about Garner and his work too. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3123435.html

I was a big fan of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child, and Red Shift as a teenager, and enjoyed The Owl Service more recently. Somehow this had passed me by. It’s a set of four novellas, set in the same family across five different generations but in the same place, Garner’s home ground, Alderley Edge in Cheshire; each story is about a turning point in the life of a child, who then turns up as an adult in the next. It’s understated, lyrical, not really about very much but very beautifully done. Garner himself apparently regards it as his masterpiece; not sure I’d completely agree with that, but I enjoyed it a lot, and it has a lot of bang for a very short book. ( )

I have read a lot of books this year, but this may be the most extraordinary. Four novellas, each about a child in a different generation of the same family, at a moment of discovery or grace or insight, intersected by people and words, places and ideas, shapes and histories, resonant with the shared myth of family and craft.

There are people who write spare prose that is sharp and precise and economical; hard-boiled sometimes. Alan Garner's prose is stripped and polished, but the result is beautifully, poetically evocative. Language for Garner is not just surface, it is something that goes all the way down, sedimentary geological layers, with the spoken sounds and read letters merely the visible features of millennia of history expressed unwittingly and perceived unknowingly. There is no sense of loss or grief in these books as things pass and people pass (though I cried twice reading it) but the sense that all things exist in their brief bright moment, and survive in the language and the actions and the genes of their ancestors and in the very bones of the place where they lived, shaping the lives of those who come after in invisible ways, only manifesting in rare secret physical forms: a name carved on a hidden block in a church steeple or a clay pie unearthed with the potatoes. So we live and commune with what has gone before, ignorant but not ignored. So we become the place where we live. Marks carved in books of stone, with love. ( )

Four stories of a family of craftsmen in rural Cheshire, from the middle of the nineteenth century to World War II. From the stonemason passing on a secret hidden deep in a cave to his daughter, to his great-grandson finding his name carved on the capstone at the top of the church steeple and beyond, the stonemasons and smiths keep the secrets of their crafts, passing them on to their successors. ( )