Tom's Midnight Garden

As a six-year-old, I was enraptured by the 1974 BBC TV adaptation of this book, thrilled by the notion that I, too, might one day find a magical route into hidden worlds.

As my reading skills improved, I did just that, thanks to a library card and books like this one. Pearce’s tale is haunting and beautifully told, and there’s an ingenious little piece of time-travel plotting involving a pair of ice skates that blew my preteen mind.

When I was a child, I was captivated by this 1958 English novel. It’s every bit as good forty years later. 

Tom, a bored boy spending the summer with his aunt and uncle, finds a rambling Victorian garden in the backyard of the house… but the garden is only there at night, gone during the day.

It’s a gripping time-travel story, one that celebrates the garden as a place where a child can stretch both limbs and mind. And through Tom’s friendship with a Victorian girl named Hatty, the novel touches beautifully upon the ache that comes from seeing your… show more.

This sweet portal fantasy explores the tender terrain of the human heart. During an outbreak, Tom is sent to live with his aunt and uncle—in a big house with no playmates and no garden. Lonely and pining, Tom stumbles into an earlier time, when the house had massive, glorious gardens, and a child his own age. He’s a kind of ghost there, but he and Hatty are real to each other... until time and growing up begins to rob them of what they had, and brings their two worlds together in a bittersweet, joyful-and-tearful ending. I first read the book… show more.

A gentler book, exquisite in its handling of the relationship between quarantined Tom and Victorian girl Hatty, whom he meets in the garden of his aunt and uncle’s house when the clock strikes thirteen. This book came second in the all-time Carnegie vote in 2007 – which shows how this tale of friendship with its perfect ending has truly stood the test of time.

Perhaps not so much time travel as a ghost story… Tom is sent away to stay with his aunt and uncle. He is lonely there with no friends to play with. One night, though, he hears the clock striking thirteen and discovers a secret garden where he meets Hatty. He soon understands that his new friend is living in another time to him and that to her, Tom is a sort of ghost.  He visits the garden on several occasions and each time Hatty has aged, and he has not.

It is a book about relationships, growing up and the… show more.

This book involves a boy, Tom, who encounters a young girl, Hatty, at night outside his aunt and uncle’s house, where he’s visiting. These visits occur in a garden, which, in daytime, does not exist. Hatty appears at different ages over the course of the book, and Tom ends up discovering the secret of the midnight garden (I don’t want to reveal the ending!).