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Books I Have Read: The Moon of Gomrath

In my first year of senior school, one of the books we read in English lessons was The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. I suppose it was a bit like a bleaker version of one of the Harry Potter novels. In any case, my friends and I loved it and couldn’t wait to get our hands on the follow up, The Moon of Gomrath. I’ve always been a fast reader and I went to bed, expecting to finish the book before I put the light out – except I never fished the book and I didn’t dare turn the light out for days afterwards. The book scared me rigid.

Forty something years on, I found both books available for Kindle and decided to see if I could actually finish them this time round. Well, I did finish them and I didn’t need to leave the bedroom light on to go to sleep. To be honest, I couldn’t actually find the bit that scared me so much all those years ago.

You know how if you revisit your childhood haunts, everything seems to be a little smaller than you remember it? It was the same with these books. The epic scale of the Weirdstone wasn’t there and Gomrath wasn’t scary. Ah well, nostalgia really isn’t as good as it used to be.