I loved The Weirdstone of Brisingamen as a child, especially as it was set in a Cheshire landscape that was familiar from Sunday runs in the Austin35 (five children crammed in the back!). I remember reading it, sick with excitement ... and would have been baffled that Alan Garner later rejected it as a 'fairly bad book'. Do children still read it today? I don't think they do; none of the children I know,anyway - it's all Harry Potter. I hadn't realised that 50 years later Garner wrote this sequel to round off the Weirdstone/Moon of Gomrath trilogy that he had abandoned - but it's a sequel for adults, not children. Colin, the child-hero, is now a brilliant but brain-damaged astro-physicist at the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, traumatised by his childhood adventures. Reader ... I hated it! I lost the will to live - and it's only 150 pages. If it baffled Ursula le Guin, what hope was there for me? I don't have much patience with fantasy and myth, but I don't see what's so clever in being obscure.