[The] technique of the great adventure with spiritual or allegorical undertones breaking through into everyday life has been employed …, with considerable success, by Alan Garner in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). But here the adventure tends to grow too titanic, the powers to belong to a greater and more heroic world, such as that created by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings; and exciting though the stories are, they tend to lose that sense of the actual and the credible…. (p. 272)