You can listen to this episode here.

In this episode, Mary Grace and Deborah reread Alan Garner’s Carnegie Medal-winning 1967 novel The Owl Service, which tells the story of three teenagers, Alison, Gwyn, and Roger, who find themselves reliving a Welsh legend of love and betrayal. Word to the wise: read it, but not right before bed like Mary Grace did!

The Owl Service has had many editions, and many covers, over the years. Here’s the first-edition cover.

Here’s the current edition that Mary Grace and Deborah read this time around, except it’s much cooler-looking in real life because what looks orange in the photo is actually a shiny copper color.

Here’s a cheesy horror movie-style cover:

And another one:

Here’s a 2021 Guardian profile of Garner.

Mary Grace recommends Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain series and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series for fans of The Owl Service.

At the beginning of the book, Alison becomes obsessed with a set of dinner plates with pictures of owls or flowers, depending on how you look at them. As Mary Grace mentions, the plates in the book were inspired by a real-life set that Garner saw at someone’s house. She rashly promised to put a photo of the plates on the website, but it turns out that it’s copyrighted. You can see it at the Bodleian Libraries‘ Facebook page.

The podcast is hosted by Buzzsprout at rereadingourchildhood.buzzsprout.com and is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms. You can listen to it on Buzzsprout here.

You can find Debby’s author interviews on her blog, Books Q&A by Deborah Kalb, and Mary Grace’s adventures in the 1920s on her blog, My Life 100 Years Ago.

This episode was edited by Adam Linder of Bespoken Podcasting.