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Title: Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White, Martin Hargreaves, Anne Fine ISBN: 1-85149-700-5 Publisher: Antique Collectors Club Pub. Date: September, 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Wonderful characters, wonderful story
Comment: Maria is a ten-year-old orphan girl, growing up in her crumbling ancestral home, under the authority of a cold guardian and a tyrannical governess. But when Maria paddles over to a small island in the center of a lake on the grounds, she makes a marvelous discovery: the island is peopled by Lilliputians. Yes, the sea captain who rescued Gulliver so long ago, returned, and trapped a group of the unfortunate Lilliputians for a sideshow act. But, they had escaped, and built themselves a new home on the island called Mistress Masham's Repose. Unfortunately, human nature has changed very little over the last three hundred years, and the Lilliputian's safety exists only in their being unknown to the humans living around them. Can Maria safeguard the little people from her greedy guardian and governess?
I caught the title of this charming book quite by accident, but am delighted to have it! Author T.H. White (who also wrote The Sword in the Stone and The Once and Future King) did an excellent job of building a magical world set into our own, peopled with characters that are fascinating, scary, charming, humorous, and so much more! The storyline kept me on the edge of my seat, as I watched Maria and the Lilliputians adventure through the book.
This is an excellent book for young readers, and for adults as well. I highly recommend this book to everyone!
Rating: 5
Summary: If you like Hermoine better than Harry
Comment: I got this for my niece, a 10-year-old re-reader of the Potter books. I had read it in my early teen years, and followed up with the King Author books. The political undercurrents were invisible to me then, and don't add much now.
She said she liked it. I'll probably get her the Sword in the Stone for Christmas.
It has a happy ending. I had a crush on the protagonist as illustrated by Eichenberg. At 52 it is difficult to be sure of one's competence in reviewing a book for young people, but the memory of it persisted so long that I missed it, long since lost, and paid an exorbitant price for a used copy for my daughter a few years ago. She liked it too.
Odious though comparisons may be, I find more magic in the characters populating Mistress Masham's Repose than I do those in the Potter books. I think, too, that there is something to be said for the progressive maturity of the subsequent White books. Years from now my daughter and niece (and I) will still be enjoying T.H. White.
Rating: 5
Summary: one of the small list of truly magical books
Comment: TH White's book has a classically "fantasy" premise: what if the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels had actually existed, indeed, still existed, hidden in the midst of an overgrown English landed estate? What would an encounter with them teach us (through the child Maria, her bullying overseers, and her beloved friends the Cook and the Professor) about our responsibilities to others? About how to determine what values to put at the center of our lives?
Few authors are able to construct a fully functioning, utterly persuasive magical world into which readers may enter, lose themselves, leave reluctantly and then return without any diminishment of effect: books one puts on the list to read annually. Most "high" literature is demanding in a different way: Moby Dick, for example, fits within this realm but who could afford the discipline Melville demands, year in and year out, in the midst of child-rearing, jobs, marriages good and bad, the demands of everyday life? These authors by contrast find a way to seduce the reader, with a seductiveness that is morally unimpeachable. Of these, the most famous, legendary, is Tolkien. Tolkien's work is portentous-- some would say pretentious-- and he barely resists the urge to preach. His work is allegory first, novel second. He asks readers to submit to him, and that monarchical elitism is disturbing even as it's seductive.
By contrast, T.H. White wrote works that existed at the edge of fact and fantasy, of historical imagination and moral imagination. The Once and Future King, his best-known epic, remains one of the most richly descriptive works of the genre, and the characters, even despite their bulldozering by Hollywood first and Disney after, remain affecting when you return to them on the actual page.
Mistress Masham's Repose is the most whimsical and most charming of his books, and it is meant to appeal with equal force to awkward children, disaffected adolescents, and adults. We believe in these characters, we recognize them not as caricatures but as real people seen with the inevitable enlarged clarity of those alienated by sensibility, by youth, or by ostracism. Some we love, some we hate, and all loom over us. For this reason, WE are the Lilliputians, just as we are the awkward difficult Maria, the brilliant befuddled Professor, and even the bullies who torment them. This is one of those books that evoke an era, create a world, and confirm or transform one's own view of one's own world. You leave it for the landscape of everyday life a bit dazzled, recognizing anew those you love, those you fear, and the responsibilities you have to all around you.
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Title: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Zena Bernstein, Robert C. O'Brien ISBN: 0689710682 Publisher: Scott Foresman (Pearson K-12) Pub. Date: 01 March, 1986 List Price(USD): $5.50 |
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Title: The Dark Is Rising Sequence: Silver on the Tree/The Grey King/Greenwitch/The Dark Is Rising/Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper ISBN: 0020425651 Publisher: Simon Pulse Pub. Date: October, 1993 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Once and Future King by T. H. White ISBN: 0441627404 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: July, 1987 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Goya by ROBERT HUGHES ISBN: 0394580281 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 11 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
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Title: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, Anthea Bell ISBN: 0439531640 Publisher: Chicken House Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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