Oh, excellent! I always wanted to read that one (it was in this big Puffin book of extracts of children's stories I used to borrow from the library and read and chase down every extract I liked), but never found it & the only one of hers I did come across later, I couldn't quite get into, but I always feel I lost out in missing her.
Tabitha sounds particularly great, and I'm not all that surprised because I did eventually manage to catch some Mahy as a children's librarian. She was also a librarian herself and one of her short stories is the completely delightful The Librarian and the Robbers. (Miss Laburnum, the beautiful orphaned librarian, is kidnapped by robbers and held to ransom! The Council, although they would like their Librarian back because Miss Laburnum has the key to the library, are not at all sure which budget ransoming the librarian comes out of and left it to the next committee meeting & of course in the meantime, Miss Laburnum converts the robbers to reading. She nearly gets pulverised by literature ("the ideal way for a librarian to die!" but all ends well, heh.)
Anyway, good luck with finding more!
I feel like there probably are Scottish/Irish things of that era, but other than obv. R. L. Stevenson for Scotland, I'm blanking at the moment.
(In later works, the main Irish one I can think of is The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea, but that is more fantasy. And Scotland, well, Katie Morag, if you want to take on some picture books!)
no subject
Tabitha sounds particularly great, and I'm not all that surprised because I did eventually manage to catch some Mahy as a children's librarian. She was also a librarian herself and one of her short stories is the completely delightful The Librarian and the Robbers. (Miss Laburnum, the beautiful orphaned librarian, is kidnapped by robbers and held to ransom! The Council, although they would like their Librarian back because Miss Laburnum has the key to the library, are not at all sure which budget ransoming the librarian comes out of and left it to the next committee meeting & of course in the meantime, Miss Laburnum converts the robbers to reading. She nearly gets pulverised by literature ("the ideal way for a librarian to die!" but all ends well, heh.)
Anyway, good luck with finding more!
I feel like there probably are Scottish/Irish things of that era, but other than obv. R. L. Stevenson for Scotland, I'm blanking at the moment.
(In later works, the main Irish one I can think of is The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O'Shea, but that is more fantasy. And Scotland, well, Katie Morag, if you want to take on some picture books!)