The Owl Service

“It’s different to the others in that it deals with adolescent crisis. This is a coming-of-age story. It is the story of a woman made of flowers–of oak broom and meadowsweet. She is created as a wife for a young man who is not allowed to have a human wife–because of a curse. And they are happy for a while until she falls for someone else. She and her lover conspire to kill her husband, who had told her he could only be killed in a particular and rather elaborate way. She tricks him into telling the secret, with unexpected consequences. You get the sense of the strange rituals–especially in Garner’s books–a sense that the stories have filtered down through the ages. In The Owl Service this idea is taken even further–in that these myths are actually manipulating the modern characters in the story. It’s just great stuff.” Read more...

Books Drawn From Myth and Fairy Tale

Alan Lee, Cartoonists & Illustrator