A Year of Reading: Airs Above The Ground by Mary Stewart - reviewed by Katherine Roberts
Yes, I know I promised to find my monthly reading in a real shop, but this one has been out of print for a while so I ordered it online from a secondhand bookseller that turned out to be a library, so it's possibly an ex-library copy and hopefully not cheating too much! Airs Above The Ground by Mary Stewart was first published in 1965. I was just three years old at the time and hadn't yet learnt to read, which might explain why it wasn't on my bookshelf back then. I've come across Mary Stewart before. I can remember our school librarian putting the first book of her Arthurian trilogy, The Crystal Cave, into my hands and assuring me I would enjoy it. I was beginning to despair because most of the other books in our girls' grammar school library were fluffy teenage romances, which bored me at the time. The Crystal Cave and its sequels The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment were my first taste of fantasy fiction, which I absolutely loved. I never looked back, ...