There is a vast gulf, often remarked upon, between the childhoods of actual children, liable like all the rest of us to the fell grip of circumstance, to poverty, accident and death, and the image of childhood in children's books. Mollie Hunter's [A Sound of Chariots] tackles this gap head on by simply crossing it…. (p. 144)

This is a gripping book, though it has no plot to speak of, and whether it is or not, it reads like an autobiography rather than a 'story'. It has the sharp immediacy, the deep feeling of well-written autobiography. It will surely touch, grieve and interest adolescent readers, as it has your reviewer, but it is hardly a book for the younger child. Oddly, it takes a certain amount of maturity to cope with a childhood other than one's own. (p. 145)