The Owl Service

The strangest and most baffling book I've read this year—and one of the best—is shelved in our Middle Reader section. Alan Garner is a legend in the UK but much less well-known here, and The Owl Service was one of his breakthrough books, winning the Carnegie Medal in 1967. Set during a family's vacation at a rural house in Wales, it bristles with class friction and complex family dynamics but also, most memorably, with the insistent, and increasingly fantastical, eruption of very local myths into the present. And the strangeness is only increased by the storytelling, which is carried off in a deceptively chatty and familiar style that makes you feel like every third sentence has been removed. You are, like most of the characters, continually catching up with what's going on, and it's worth it. (Age 10 and up)