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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb fantasy writing, 5 Oct 2009
This is fantasy writing of the highest order, to rank alongside the best of Alan Garner, Susan Cooper or Ursula le Guin. Wrightson is Australian and there is a powerful sense of Australia, ancient, primordial,overwhelming. The real and magical are interwoven in this landscape, and at the heart is the Nargun, a huge, unknowable, terrifying creature. But the Nargun is vulnerable too. The human characters, orphan Simon and his uncle and aunt, must defeat it to survive, yet to do so is to lose something extraordinary. Susan Cooper's recommendation on the cover says it all, 'Fantasy of a very uncommon kind: accessible yet profound, immensely readable'. This is a superb book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Still spine-tingling after all these years., 10 Aug 2009
I read this book, or had it read to me by my father, when I was a child, and the story of lonely Simon and the peculiar creatures on the ranges of Wongadilla has stayed strongly with me ever since. Never go back, they say, but I read it again a couple of weeks ago, and was delighted to find that it is still marvellous. The sense of place is evocative, Wongadilla being a timeless wrinkle in the Australian ranges where human beings and their actions are small and brief in comparison to the other inhabitants of the valley. Into the country of the Potkoorok and his swamp, the Turongs in their trees, comes the Nargun, a living stone, old as the earth and a threat that all those in the valley must face. The writing is terse and descriptive, and does not talk down to the young reader. A sharp, gripping, moving and satisfying read.
The current paperback's got a nasty cover, though but...
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![Lewis - Series Two [DVD] [2007]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HL2O5Q3nL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Laurence Fox
