A very off-putting book.

Such a delight* to see the Bury Your Gays trope alive and well in children's fiction in 2018.

*Not a delight, not a delight at all.

The hard cover edition includes a foreward by Arthur Ransome telling how the school girl authors sent the book to him and he arranged for it to be published

A lovely story of children running free during the holidays, with ponies and rafts.

Starting to read this it felt very like total immersion science fiction, as I tried to work out what was happening (and discarded various theories as they failed to fit). This book is hard work in the best of ways, it mirrored various aspects of mundane life in a magical world in ways I haven't seen before, and the problems its protagonist faced were so real as to seem insoluble and I still don't know what the right answers were.
Certainly not standard quest fantasy, this has wonderful world building in simple community life. And I loved the profanity.

A very short book about ponies? Must be a children's book, right? At least that was what the well meaning adult who gave it to me must have thought. A lesson in harsh reality.

An extremely good collection with a wide range of stories that pay homage rather than imitate.

A sequel to Beak of the Moon (see my review of that) set in the present.

An absolutely wonderful and unique Watership Dawn style book for New Zealand. Keas are New Zealand's alpine parrots, intensely curious social trouble makers. They are one of the world's most intelligent parrots (though they can't mimic human speech), the only parrot living where it snows and they will eat meat when available (including killing sheep). Beak of the Moon has a similar plot to Watership Down, several young males are forced out of an authoritarian group and undertaken a dangerous journey looking for a new place to live, and has a similar mythic quality, while being solidly grounded in real kea behaviour.

The gem in this collection is Peter Dickinson's 'Flight', a history and ethnography of a people who no one ever meets. Brilliant and whimsical.

Should have stayed a short story.

This one kind of lost me when the protagonist confimed the Coriolis effect using an aeroplane toilet.