THE BLUE HILLS

This is a book that is -- on the face of it -- hard to place, and the publishers are making it double hard by their apparent uncertainty, listing it first as an adult book, then as a juvenile. For our money, we'd place it as an adult book, for we found it perfect fantasy escape for troubled times, and that blend of realism and fantasy that Elizabeth Goudge can do, but which appeals more to the imaginative adult than to the child, who wants either realism or fantasy, sharply defined. The characters stem back to her lovely City of Bells; the village personalities congregate for young Hugh Anthony's birthday picnic in the blue hills. And there, two by two, they drift over the borderline of reality, into the legendary fey world of the town's past. There, too, each one finds that quality he (or she) had thought lost, and the return to real life finds each one a bigger and a better person. A book to lift one out of self and into another world. But chose your market with care.