Customer Reviews

An Older Kind of Magic (Young Puffin Books)

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Patricia Wrightson has been largely dismissed because of discomfort with her "appropriation" of Australian aboriginal mythology. Well, maybe there is something to that criticism, but if she appropriated, then she appropriated brilliantly, and she remains very much worth seeking out by the discerning fantasy reader.

More than fifteen years before "urban fantasy" was invented, Patricia Wrightson wrote this fantasy novel set entirely in the city of Sydney. Her version of Sydney is soaked with magic. Most of it is rather cheap modern magic, but barely showing through the cracks, where at first we only glimpse it occasionally out of the corner our eyes, is an older kind of magic. Magic that is rooted in the land that still abides under the city, that predates it and will outlast it.

The story follows the adventures of three children, an advertising man, a cat, and a millionaire as a rare convergence causes the tide of ancient magic to rise, to change their lives forever, and to vanish into the shadows again.

It's not an immensely gripping or fast-moving story, and it isn't by any means Ms Wrightson's best work, but it is entirely fresh, unlike any fantasy story I have read, and that alone makes it extra magical.

If you know Sydney at all this is a great read, with kids living on roof tops, evil developers, the power of the comet and ancient mischievous creation figures in the ground beneath the city. I takes you on a ride through the magic and wonder of kids who know their world and learn to fight for it.

A nice change of pace to have Australian mythology in a story like this.

A young girl and some other children discover that there are
non-human creatures, and even magical beings living in the corners and
hideaways and shadows and parks of the city, and you don't notice them
until you know how to look.