The Children of Green Knowe is a story where you thoroughly forget its being just a story. The narrator seems transparent, you get to experience things first hand. For me it was one of those books that reminded me how I felt when I was little and holidays came, what I wished and prayed for and seemed to forget after I grew up, but not entirely. Green Knowe is a series of six children's novels written by Lucy M. Boston, illustrated by her son Peter Boston, [1] and published from 1954 to 1976. [2] [3] It features a very old house, Green Knowe, based on Boston's home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, England. [4] In the novels she brings to life the people she imagines might have lived there. [5] Julian Fellowes wrote and directed a film adaptation of The Chimneys of Green Knowe, titled From Time to Time (2009). Boston has an artist's eye for detail and a magician's manner with words and mood, as in the following moments.

Snow falling: "The snow was piling up on the branches, on the walls, on the ground, on St. Christopher's face and shoulders, without any sound at all, softer than the thin spray of fountains, or falling leaves, or butterflies against a window, or wood ash dropping, or hair when the barber cuts it. Yet when a flake landed on his cheek, it was heavy. He felt the splosh but could not hear it."Jordan, Robin G. (24 December 2014). "The Children of Green Knowe: Make It a Christmas Tradition". Anglicans Ablaze. Jordan, Robert G. (24 December 2014). "The Children of Green Knowe: Make It a Christmas Tradition". Anglicans Ablaze. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

The children arrive and begin to explore the river and canals round Green Knowe by canoe. Unlike the previous two books, this book centres on the river which flows past the manor, and adjacent islands. The children's adventures here are based in their current time, though strongly fantasy-based; they meet a bus driver who's retreated from modern money-based society, see flying horses, meet a giant, and witness a Bronze Age moon ceremony. The subtext, of homeless children being protected and healed by the house and its enchantments, is particularly strong. The Children of Green Knowe is, overall, a quiet book, a book of discovery. Though the remnants of an old curse present a threat, it's only briefly. Stronger than the sense of danger is the sense of joy: Joy of place and joy in nature. Tolly makes friends not only with the children, but with the birds and small animals in the winter garden. Lucy Wood was born in Southport, Lancashire, on 10 December 1892, the fifth of six children of James Wood, engineer and sometime Mayor of Southport, and Mary Garrett. She had two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, she describes life in an affluent middle class Victorian family of committed Wesleyans. Her father was "eccentric with big ideas, a small, good-humoured, dynamic man". [2]Boucher, Anthony (June 1956). "Recommended Reading". The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. p.102.

What a warm and wonderful book this is!! I wish I had read it when I was a child but am so glad I have gotten to read it now as an adult. This book is utterly charming. Brian Sibley dramatised an eponymous radio play adaptation of The Children of Green Knowe, directed by Marilyn Imrie, which aired on BBC Radio 4 on 18 December 1999. Jasper Rose, Lucy Boston, a Bodley Head Monograph, 1965: discusses and analyses Lucy Boston as a children's writer. LCCN 66--11118 She [Linnet] had a spruce tree in her bedroom...for the birds. On such a night her tame birds had come to sleep in its branches. They were curled up with their heads under their wings. The tits were balls of blue, or primrose-green; the robins red; the chaffinches pink. Linnet had put a crystal star on top. It glittered among the shadows in the candlelight. Find sources: "The River at Green Knowe"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( May 2015) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)The first five books were published in the UK by Faber and Faber, from 1954 to 1964, and in the US by Harcourt, the first in 1955, and the others within the calendar year of British publication. The last book appeared after more than a decade, published by The Bodley Head and Atheneum Books in 1976. [2] [3] Best of all, the writing is beautiful. Take the first description of Grandmother Oldknow whose "face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her." Or read any of the descriptions of the nature around Green Knowe. I also appreciated the unpredictable, sometimes frustrating nature of the house's magic. Tolly gradually learns to accept the fact that he never knows quite when the other children will be visible to him, but it is frustrating at first. He wants his friends to be present all the time. "I want to be with them. Why can't I be with them?" he cries at one point. It is wonderful, but sometimes frustrating. This book is a delight to read aloud, the poetic descriptions, conversations, stories by the fire, interspersed with excerpts of carols make it a magical story to read aloud yourself by your fire just as Tolly and Grandmother Oldknow do themselves by theirs.

a b c "Carnegie Medal Award". 2007(?). Curriculum Lab. Elihu Burritt Library. Central Connecticut State University ( CCSU). Retrieved 21 August 2012. In 2011, Boston's supernatural tales were collected in the volume Curfew & Other Eerie Tales (Dublin: Swan River Press). This volume includes unpublished tales as well as a reprint of the two-act play The Horned Man.http://www.quilt.co.uk/?p=76 — article about Lucy Boston with illustrations of some of the patchworks