I have to admit that I'm prejudiced. With very few exceptions, I believe that the best books for young people are written by the British. For imagination, intelligence, and maturity nothing I've read by authors from any other country has matched anything that has come out of the British Islands. From the historical fiction of Geoffrey Treece, Arthur Ransom's sailing adventure stories (Swallows And Amazons) the fantasy of C.S. Lewis (Narnia) to today's magical Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, they have offered sufficient proof to convince me of their superiority in this field.
My prejudice has reached the point where I now automatically assume that any halfway decent novel for young people has to have been written by a Brit because no one else seems capable of achieving what they do in the field. So when I watched the DVD of The Spiderwick Chronicles for the first time I took it for granted the movie had been based on books by a British writer. Even the movie being set in the United States did nothing to shake me of my conviction as plenty of books have had their settings transposed to appease an American movie audience.
So to say I was surprised to discover that the book's author and illustrator, Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, were both American was an understatement. I had been so delighted with the movie, I looked the books up on the Internet to find out who had published them to see if it were possible to obtain a review copy, and was directed to the Spiderwick Chronicles web site and found out the truth of the matter.
Of course I still hadn't read the books and there was always the off chance that they could suck, but given how good the movie was I seriously doubted that. Now, thanks to the good people at Simon & Schuster Canada who supplied me with a copy of The Spiderwick Chronicles: The Complete First Serial, an omnibus edition containing all five books, (The Field Guide, The Seeing Stone, Lucinda's Secret, The Ironwood Tree and The Wrath Of Mulgarath), I have confirmation that the books are every bit as, if not more, wonderful than the movie. Like the titles named earlier, these books have a timeless quality that will ensure them being read by children, and adults, for generations to come.
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