Welcome back, welcome anew
In a high street bookshop yesterday, I was delighted to see that The Book of Three, the opener for Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, has just been republished in a new paperback edition, under the Usborne Modern Classics imprint.
Of course, originally written in the early 1960s, it is not actually 'magic fiction since Potter'. But what it is is one of the most important precursors of almost all subsequent 'high fantasy' for children. It is strongly rooted in Welsh landscape and mythology (especially the Mabinogion), an interest which its US author apparently developed whilst training there during WWII. However, it is far from a simple reworking but a piece of immensely powerful and hugely entertaining imaginative storytelling. It full deserves to be ranked as one of the all-time greats of children's fantasy literature, and arguably of all children's fiction.
Today, it is perhaps not as widely renowned here as it has always been in the USA, but it fully deserves to be. I strongly recommended any UK (and other) Primary teachers, who do not already know it, to take this opportunity to add it to their repertoire. It is a real 'classic', but not in any off-putting sense. As a read for children (9-13 ish?) it shows hardly a day of its 54 years, and remains as enthralling and exciting an extended high fantasy as you could possibly find. I truly hope the new version in the shops will bring many more young readers to discover its magic and that Usborne will extend the republication into the rest of this seminal series.
