Student Question
How is Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pierce a crossover novel?
Quick answer:
Tom's Midnight Garden is a crossover novel because it features time travel, allowing Tom to move between the 20th century and the Victorian era, creating a "chronological crossover." Additionally, the novel appeals to both children and adults, making it a crossover in terms of audience. The concept of a crossover can also involve characters or worlds crossing into others, but in this book, it is primarily about crossing time and appealing to multiple age groups.
Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce can be considered a crossover novel because Tom travels in time between his own era and the nineteenth century. It may also be regarded as a crossover novel in a different sense because it is a children's book that also appeals to adults.
The term crossover has several different meanings in fiction. It can refer to a character from one book or series of books making an appearance in another, as Tom Sawyer appears in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It can also be used when characters cross from one world to another, as in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In Tom's Midnight Garden, Tom moves between his own era, the middle of the twentieth century, and the Victorian era. This might be termed a chronological crossover. The book is also a crossover in the sense that it is a fantasy novel written primarily for children that crosses over the boundaries of genre to be enjoyed by an adult audience.
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