An Episode of Sparrows [Paperback]

An emergency meeting of the Mortimer Square Garden Committee has been convened to discuss a most alarming matter: Someone has been digging in the garden and making off with buckets of dirt. Miss Angela Chesney is sure that a gang of boys from run-down Catford Street is to blame. But Angela’s sister, Olivia, isn’t so sure. Olivia has always wondered why the neighborhood children—the “sparrows” she sometimes watches from the window of her house—are kept out of the private garden. Don’t they have a right to enjoy the place, too? But neither Angela nor Olivia has any idea what sent the neighborhood waif Lovejoy Mason and her few friends in search of good, rich earth. Still less do they imagine where their investigation of the incident will lead them—to a struggling restaurant, a bombed-out church, and at the heart of it all, a hidden garden.“It would be impossible for a reader not to feel better from reading the story...her rich understanding of human nature, her humor and her beautiful prose inevitably leave one aglow.” —Chicago Tribune 

“A gentle, poignant story, poetically conceived with a fairy godmother ending. Recommended for all...” —Library Journal 

“I’m amazed now at the depth and detail of this short novel. It’s a masterpiece of construction and utterly, realistically convincing—though it has a fairytale element too. Rumer Godden’s books are admired for many qualities...but I think her greatest strength is her accurate, unsentimental portrayal of children....An Episode of Sparrowswas the first book that made me cry when I was ten. I cried all over again at this recent reading of the story—and I closed the book with the same sense of total satisfaction.” —Jacqueline Wilson,former Children’s Laureate, United Kingdom
 
“[An] extraordinarily gifted writer who ml³