Nancy Bond

A boy visiting Wales while his father has a visiting teaching position there finds Taliesin's harp key. The key somehow shows Peter events in Taliesin's life, as he (Peter) struggles to come to terms with being away from home and the tensions between him and his father and sisters. It's a lovely tale, both the story of the Morgan family and the bits about Taliesin in the past. I particularly enjoyed the homey feel to their interactions with their Welsh neighbors and descriptions of the countryside. However, Peter's sister, Jen, through whose view much of the modern plot was told, was irritating and not at all likable. Also, the story seemed to get bogged down somehow in the middle and the going was painfully slow for a good while. Could have been the narrator (I listened to an audio version); I may have had a better go of it in print.… (mais)

This won a Newbery award in the '70s, but it is not a book for the ages. You could make a pretty rowdy drinking game out of this book, if you drank whenever David, the father, known by his first name, smiles "ruefully" to indicate that he knows that even though he is an adult he has not got all the answers, or whenever Jen, one of the POV characters, speaks "drily". It is reminiscent of "A Wrinkle in Time", because the family is essentially well off and the members of the family are all well-disposed toward each other, somehow. There is, in each case, an injury to the family, in one, a mother is dead and in another the father has gone missing. But these injuries affect only the feelings of the characters, and otherwise do not upset their lives. There is some terrible philosophizing in which people assert that they may not believe what Peter is telling them, but they believe _Peter_. They believe that Peter sincerely believes something which they know is completely untrue, and so everything is OK?

It's clear that the author really enjoyed her stay in Wales, and it is nice that she was able to write about it. The same thing happened to Lloyd Alexander, and that's great, because I really like his books. But the only value of this book to me was it reminded me of how powerfully novels can work on young childrens' minds to make them believe pretty dumb things, i.e, that is right and proper for parents and children to believe, think, and act like they do in these books.

I would say that like so many books from the 70s this describes a Wales that is quite gone. There are probably no doughty Welsh shepherds anywhere in Wales any more, it just doesn't pay enough.

The character of Taliesin as he appears to Peter is distant, but actually quite interesting. But the events in his world had little bearing on the events in the modern world.

Jen calls the "laundromat" the "washeteria".… (mais)