REVIEWSDavid Collings reads wonderfully well. Craftsman has produced a beautiful package of CD's. Kim Bunce, The Observer, 24 June 2007 …The ultimate masterpiece is Craftsman Audio's recording of Ursula le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. Craftsman is a young company specialising in unabridged classic fantasy. These are like nothing else on the market, partly because of their superior casing and track listing (so you don't lose your place), but also as stunningly good drama. A Wizard of Earthsea is a thrilling literary masterpiece which adults enjoy as much as children of 10 and over. Karen Archer's immaculate reading captures the purity of the prose, really an epic poem, telling how Ged, a young goatherd, discovers his power as a wizard. The specially-composed lute music is exactly right, and this is electrifying. Slightly younger children meanwhile will want to open John Masefield's The Box of Delights … sequel to The Midnight Folk (also Craftsman). Kay is home for the Christmas holidays but the wicked Abner Brown and his coven have not given up. A mysterious Punch and Judy man has a magic box which can enable you to shrink, go swift, or travel back in time, and the witches will stop at nothing to get it back. Richard Mitchley has a voice that is as rich as plum pudding, perfect for high Edwardian entertainment of this kind. Amanda Craig, The Independent, 3 December 2006 And if they’re older, Craftsman Audio’s marvellous, unabridged fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin … gets a wonderful reading from Karen Archer as the boy Ged summons a dark and malevolent spirit which cannot be conquered by sorcery and has to search all the isles of Earthsea and its oceans for a way to contain it. As the text matches the paperback, struggling older readers could look and listen to something that’s truly exciting! Kati Nicholl, The Daily Express, 12 January 2007
The Midnight Folk Hurrah for Craftsman, who are doing some of the best fantasy fiction around - they also have Ursula le Guin's masterpiece A Wizard of Earthtsea and Catherine Fisher's Snow Walker Son on audio. This is for younger children of 8+ and is the story of how lonely orphaned Kay discovers his governess is a witch, bent on unearthing a lost treasure. With the help of a cat, a fox and several toys Kay rides on a broomstick, becomes invisible, joins King Arthur and travels into the past to find out what really happened. Masefield was a Poet Laureate and writes like a dream, but this is also a hugely entertaining and influential novel (you can find out where the living chessmen in Harry Potter come from, for instance) that children still love. The reading is superb, as is the music. Amanda Craig on AMAZON.CO.UK, 1 July 2006 For Masefield, The Midnight Folk was 'a tale full of episode made to be read aloud'. Almost eighty years after publication of the first Kay Harker adventure, the enterprising Craftsman Audio Books has released The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights in unabridged audio versions on compact disc. … To my mind, the unabridged full-text audio publication of a book must be the pinnacle of audio textual publishing and comprises high praise on the part of the publisher towards the source material. These new recordings are, I think, phenomenal. The actor Richard Mitchley is the sole speaker for each book and demonstrates a considerable range of characterisation. He uses a large range of accents to help differentiate between different characters: Rollicum Bitem becomes Irish, Old Abner becomes (as he should be) American and Otter reveals a Scottish lilt. Abner Brown's 'silky voice' has a velvet legato about it whilst Sylvia Daisy Pouncer has a clipped harshness that is both authoritative and soft … It is all achieved in a virtuoso display and the one actor doing everything enables tight and effective dramatic timing. … This is not a product that cuts corners! … the choice of Saint-Saens' Dance Macabre for The Midnight Folk … is, I think, a magnificent complement to the book. … these recordings will appeal to all and I heartily recommend them. Indeed, listening to The Box of Delights on the train just before Christmas and travelling into work I found myself delighted when South-West trains caused delays to my journey. Phillip W Errington, The Journal of the John Masefield Society, Vol. 15, June 2006. Books about childhood hit hard if they are heartfelt. A hundred years separates the bullying of Jason Taylor in a Worcestershire village in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green … and the fantastical adventures of Kay Harker in John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk (Craftsman), but both are rooted in real experience … Masefield was brought up by an insensitive maiden aunt every bit as mean as Kay’s sinister governess, Sylvia Pouncer. Jason and Kay share a boldness of character and honesty of spirit that helps them to cope with adversity imaginatively … Kay has magical allies who drag him underground and into the past to find his ancestor’s treasure; they and his enemies have names as evocative as any in Masefield’s nautical ballads: Twiney Pricker and Bendigo, Pimply Whatto and Dowsabell, Blackmalkin and Abner Brown. Finding good readers for books written from a child’s viewpoint is not easy; mumsie voices or over-egged juvenility ruin many recordings of fine books … Richard Mitchley relishes the glorious rhythms of Masefield’s prose but sustains the matter-of-factness essential to a convincing reading of fantasy. Chance led me to listen to these books in the same week, but the effect was to enjoy both the more …The Midnight Folk is a classic adventure, as enjoyable to revisit as an adult as it is to read as a child. Craftsman also publishes its equally fine sequel, The Box of Delights. Christine Hardyment, The Times, 20 May 2006
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Fantastic audiobook of magical classic