Set in the Yorkshire dales, [A Grass Rope] is a treasure hunt, like so many of William Mayne's books, but with the difference that one of the characters, young Mary, believes so firmly in magic that her interpretation of events dominates the story rather than her parents's common-sense or Adam Forrest's grammar-school reasoning. (p. 140)

It is certainly not inappropriate to use the word 'magic' of a story where the author makes you aware of the irrational all the time, the poetic below the events of ordinary life, and does this while keeping his characters absolutely real, not eccentric or peculiar, but people with character and drive and personal idiom.

Mayne's particular contribution to the fantastic adventure is the way he makes the vision of certain of his characters override actual events. In [this book, which has a simple, almost hackneyed plot], the tone is set by Mary's belief in fairyland…. (pp. 140-41)

In [Mayne's] three choir-school stories the dialogue is curiously formalized and yet so apposite that it gets nearer to the real talk of boys than anything I have read later than Tom Sawyer. (p. 174)

From the dialogue and the narrative in Mayne's books you are always aware, too, of the extreme concreteness of the junior world (not an easy thing to get into a book). Mary's delight in the 'white stick' in A Grass Rope, the absorption of Owen in the ball and key he has found, in A Swarm in May, the map on the damp wall in The World Upside Down—all these objects are crucial to the stories, but they are also important to the children who handle or observe or find them, for their shape or texture or colour. This is one of the most important qualities of Mayne's work and links him with writers like Walter de la Mare and Elizabeth Coatsworth and Laura Ingalls Wilder, writers who have a particular faculty for reliving the life of the senses which a child cannot communicate directly to an adult. (p. 175)

I know no recent children's stories more actual than William Mayne's, whether he is writing about a school or a village or a small town; and perhaps he is a little difficult for children to appreciate just for this reason, because he utterly ignores any compromise, any of the formulas which endear more popular writers to children. But the child who plunges into his stories, forgetting fashion, listening to the dry, crisp dialogue, and seeing in his mind's eye the scenes so minutely and economically visualized, has found a companion for life, no less. (p. 281)

[William Mayne] is surely the most original and stimulating writer for children of our day. Here [in A Parcel of Trees] is the usual bounty of freshly observed scenes, emotions, conversations and characters, each indicated with the minimum of words and contrivance, the maximum of humour and sympathy. The story is one of his most approachable and the problem is less elaborately worked out than some he has evolved…. As in real life some of the allusions and explanations are obscure at first but there is plenty to intrigue and please and it is all even better the second time round—and the third and fourth, for the Mayne books make some of the best re-reading ever written and always the wonder grows—how does he do it, all so deftly and astonishingly right without ever forcing the pace or being merely clever? (p. 156)

The Junior Bookshelf, July, 1963.

[Words and Music] is splendid stuff. It is not often an author maintains such a vein of uproarious humour which yet keeps the reader quiet, as it were, in case he should miss one of the quips when it comes along. The story does not matter very much, though it has many good moments. What grips the reader's attention is the rapidity and subtlety of Mr. Mayne's picture of life in a choir school where everything is geared to singing and services and every boy is at the mercy of some musical or clerical whim. The author has the details of this "order of service" so thoroughly and intimately taped that one is soon in a fever of excitement and enveloped in the boys' own mild nightmare of assignments and adjustments. As a picture of a school at work it is at once efficient and human and it never slackens off. (p. 351)

The Junior Bookshelf, December, 1963.