Lucy M Boston’s The Stones of Green Knowe is a time-slip story for 8 year olds about a boy who watches his own house being built.<\/p>\n
Roger is eleven. His father holds the manor for a Norman earl, and what Roger cares about most in the world is the stone house going up in their fields. He has never seen a house with an upstairs. He can’t quite picture it.<\/p>\n
So he hangs about the builders. The master mason lets him try his hand, and teaches him that stone has a grain like wood, and that some stone is loyal and will last for ever. One block came out of a church the Vikings burned down. It’s going in the upper room.<\/p>\n
That’s the sort of book this is. The hearthstone goes down with silver under it for wealth, iron to keep the Little People away, and a live toad, because toads are supposed to live for hundreds of years. Nobody thinks any of that is strange.<\/p>\n
Roger is on his own a lot. His big brother is away fighting, his sisters are shut indoors with their needles, and the pages are too old for him. He fills the days minding sheep.<\/p>\n
Then he finds two stone seats on a scrubby little island, chipped out with stone rather than iron and far too small for a bishop. He clears the brambles and calls them the King and Queen.<\/p>\n
One midday he sits on one, looks at his new house far off in the valley and thinks how much he’d like to know it’s still standing a long way ahead. He blows a dandelion clock to pick the number. Five hundred and forty years.<\/p>\n
And then he’s walking up the river bank, and the ferry has turned into a bridge, and two men stroll past in ribbons, high heels and enormous feathered hats, talking a very silly sort of English.<\/p>\n
It’s a quiet book, and it asks your reader to enjoy mud, weather and birdsong as much as magic. Nothing gets explained. (There’s a proper dog fight early on, and that toad under the hearth, if either of those lands badly with your child.)<\/p>\n
If they like the idea of a boy loose in a house far older than he is, The Haunting of Falcon House is in the library too. A young prince arrives alone at his family’s estate in Saint Petersburg and keeps seeing a boy nobody else can see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lucy M Boston’s The Stones of Green Knowe is a time-slip story for 8 year olds about a boy who watches his own house being built. Roger is eleven. His father holds the manor for a Norman earl, and what Roger cares about most in the world is the stone house going up in their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11624,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9114,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Haunting of Falcon House","lr_seo_hook":"A dandelion clock sends a Norman boy five hundred and forty years on."},"book_tag":[27],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[647],"class_list":["post-9432","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-fantasy-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-lucy-m-boston"],"yoast_title":"The Stones of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A dandelion clock sends a Norman boy five hundred and forty years on. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n