MacDonald was a nineteenth century writer of fantasy and children's books who was highly regarded by JRR Tolkien, WH Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle, but who is little known today.
I first read this book at the age of nine or ten because it was lying around in my grandparents' attic, so when I found out that it was a free book on iBooks, I decided to download and read it again.
Despite a few touches of Victorian sappiness, this is an imaginative and well-written story about a princess who lives in a land haunted by goblins that come out only at night. One day, she and her nurse stay out too late and are pursued by the goblins, only to be saved by Curdie, the son of a miner, who is very familiar with the goblins, since the miners have to deal with them all the time. A bit later, the princess wanders into a section of the castle she has not seen before and finds a mysterious old woman who claims to be her great-great grandmother.
I think this book would appeal to readers of Harry Potter or His Dark Materials.
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Bedside book: THE MAN WITH THE BALTIC STARE by James Church
This is a really odd addition to the Inspector O series about North Korea. Inspector O has retired to carve wood in a mountaintop hut, but in the year 2015, he is called back to Pyongyang for purposes that no one explains adequately. This one is definitely strange, and I haven't read far enough to know what I think of it.
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