Hey! Harry Potter has cousins!

J.K. Rowling has the Midas touch. Her Harry Potter series has drawn even the most recalcitrant nonreaders into the orbit of literature, and has rejuvenated the children's fiction industry (children's paperback book sales are up an astounding 24 percent). Last year, when Rowling professed admiration for Dodie Smith's 1948 I Capture the Castle ($13.95, 343 pp., age thirteen and up), Saint Martin's Press quickly repackaged their backlist staple and saw a five-fold increase in sales.

It is easy to see Smith's appeal to Rowling. Both are attracted to the incidental. Both have a penchant for vivid throwaway scenes. They provide welcome relief from the derivative minimalism and dreary realism of so much contemporary children's fiction.

Readers of I Capture the Castle will feel as if they have wandered into a stylish Broadway farce, with reason. Dodie Smith (1896E1990), though now best known for The Hundred and One Dalmatians, was a playwright before a novelist. I Capture the Castle is her crossover debut, a coming-of-age story told from the point of view of a charming seventeen-year-old diarist, Cassandra Mortmain, younger daughter of a penniless and hopelessly blocked modernist writer. This widower, along with three children and new bride, Topaz (a former artist's model who wanders around in less than everything), is hunkered down in his deceased wife's decaying estate in rural England awaiting inspiration, or at least a source of income. The latter appears, anachronistically, in the guise of two rich young bachelors who have just inherited the estate next door. It's Jane Austen meets Noel Coward, with an unforgettable narrator. Cassandra is sharp as a tack, awkward, and still young enough to greet her awakening desire and finer perceptions with astonishment and hyperbole. This is a fun book for adults, and a perfect one for adolescent girls.

Christopher Paul Curtis's Newbery Medal-winning Bud, Not Buddy (Delacorte, $15.95, 245 pp., age ten and up) is another novel radiant with charm, as embodied in a narrator just ready to exit childhood. The ten-year-old African-American Bud Caldwell is in flight from his Depression-era orphanage and latest abusive foster home. He sets out by foot from Flint, Michigan, in search of his father, who he believes is the legendary band leader Herman Calloway. With his goofy coping strategies, delayed epiphanies, and sweet impulses, Bud seems an utterly authentic boy. Because Curtis has created a perfectly rendered character rather than a sociological fact, he conveys, without a drop of the dreary or the maudlin, the loneliness, fear, and grief with which Bud has lived since his mother's death. Curtis also masterfully unfolds a portrait of the black working class in the Depression. And he beautifully captures the divide between young children and concerned adults, which sometimes, by great effort and grace, is bridged.

Curtis's easy blend of the social and the particular, and his immense warmth also animate his highly praised first novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 (Yearling, $5.50, 210 pp., age ten and up). This too is set in Flint's black working-class community, though during the civil rights struggle, and with a focus on a single family. It too is narrated by a fetching ten-year-old, named Kenny. The story equally belongs to his thirteen-year-old brother Byron, a bona fide juvenile delinquent, who careens from tender to embarrassed to cruel, alienated, and terrified. He is the proximate cause of the family's trip to his mother's native Birmingham, where his parents trust that the stricter climate of his grandmother's home and city will help. What they do not anticipate is that the shift in his behavior, as well as Kenny's world- view, will turn on the immense shock of the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963.

One of the less creative responses to the Harry Potter phenomenon has been that adults keep pointing book-hungry children to other fantasy literature rather than to whatever is good regardless of genre. But even this can be forgiven since it seems to be what is behind the recent republication of Alan Garner's opus. Garner is widely regarded as the finest postwar children's writer in England, but he is scarcely known here. While most strongly associated with fantasy, Garner has written for all ages, and in several genres.

Of the fantasy novels, my favorites are the 1960 The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Magic Carpet/Harcourt Brace, $6, 286 pp., age ten and up) and the 1967 The Owl Service (Magic Carpet, $6, 219 pp., age twelve and up). Garner wrote Weirdstone at age twenty-two, having just relinquished his studies aimed at becoming a professor of classics in favor of returning to his native Cheshire. It is in this geologically and linguistically rich region that his family has lived for three hundred years, working as rural craftsmen. "If I have any real occupation," Garner has written, "it is to be here." As a chosen craft, writing has allowed Garner to integrate the personal, cultural, and linguistic dislocation (Garner identifies his first language as North- West Mercian, and his second as Standard English) that he experienced as the first in his family to receive a grammar-school and university education. The Owl Service is his only book set outside East Cheshire.

Both novels center on outsider children coming to live temporarily in rural landscapes that are linguistically and physically exotic and saturated with myths. (These are not invented but are real stories specific to the real sites: Garner is a serious anthropologist and archaeologist of place.) The children are swept up into stories that predate them and which will remain after them, stories whose outcomes depend upon their right action. I have never read a novelist who handles terror like Garner. He almost entirely forgoes conventional suspense in favor of the fear attendant on getting the task done-a fear the children must push back lest it overwhelm them. The Owl Service, which is particularly deft, layers on top of this a very bracing look at the sexual and social tension between the visiting English and a native adolescent, Gwyn, who is the first literate child of his family.

Partly as a result of his training in classics, and partly to honor rural reticence, Garner strips his writing to the bone: each word, each scene, and each gesture is necessary, and its absence unimaginable. This is especially true of the recently republished 1976 The Stone Book Quartet (Flamingo, $17.50, 172 pp., all ages) which I regard as his masterpiece. These interlocking stories-The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, The Aimer Gate, Tom Fobble's Day-trace Garner's family from the Victorian period to World War II. The focus is on human labor, not aspiration or regret or sentiment. Still, these books are dense with feeling. The landscape testifies to the habitation and acts of the dead, which, if inscrutable to the living, evoke inexpressibly deep emotion. A young girl discovers a fossilized handprint and stands in mute wonder; a cheap pipe is dropped and four generations (and books) later is found by a boy who prizes it as his birthright; a house torn down in Granny Reardun, so that its dimension stone can be used to build the vicar's garden wall, remains as an earthen bump in Tom Fobble's Day which merely thrills the sled-riding descendant of the family expelled from it. This hint that the bump the children sled over hides a ruined foundation grips the story's more sensitive boy with a complex terror and joy.

While all the authors already mentioned give pleasure, Garner achieves something much rarer: a sense of awe before the marvelous. The effect comes not simply from the characters' contact with an uncannily peopled and storied topography, but from Garner's judicious integration of his region's dialect and standard English. In his 1997 collected essays, The Voice That Thunders (Harvill, $24, 244 pp.), Garner talks about the absolute necessity, for our souls, of achieving a language which brackets stories off from the everyday. He loathes, in equal measure, versions of the old stories which value relevance and accessibility above all, and those that are insistently pure in their use of dialect.

That commitment to a language which opens us to a larger temporality than the one in which we think we dwell makes Garner an excellent re- teller of fairy tales. He has collections of British tales which are out of print (check your library) and several picture books which are still available, including The Well of the Wind (illustrated by Herve Blondon, DK Ink, $14.95, 44 pp.) and Once Upon a Time though it Wasn't in Your Time and it wasn't in my time and it wasn't in anybody else's time (DK, $12.95, 29 pp.). The latter is felicitously illustrated by Norman Messenger, who visually underscores Garner's emphasis on repetition.

In all his work, Garner extends the reach of children's literature. In the essays, he argues that the rise of a separate sphere called children's literature has had spirit-wasting effects. It has put adults beyond the reach of myth and tales that they urgently need. And it has left children vulnerable to the didactic and the reductive in both literature and the teaching of literature. I recommend his essay collection not only for this persuasive dissent, but for the interest and intelligence with which Garner approaches subjects as various as Cheshire archeology, Welsh mythology, aboriginal theories of time, and his long struggle with manic depression.

Garner is England's great artist of place, and Joan Bodger is our most appreciative and insightful literary tourist. In 1958, this American storyteller and children's book reviewer (who had an English parent and who now resides in Canada) traveled to England with her historian husband and two young children to find and visit the sites (and even some authors) of their favorite children's books. How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books (McClelland & Stewart, $23.95, 249 pp.) is the result, an underground classic that has just come back into print.

The desire to see the real places in which the fictional Pooh, Rat, Mole, Squirrel Nutkin, and Puck wandered could easily descend into a dreadful literalism. But Bodger is a smart guide and a smart mother. She always shows and tells and enjoys in a way that nurtures, not confines, her children's imaginations. This is a multilayered narrative. Bodger provides a superlative guide to English children's books. She conveys the persistence and felicity at the heart of literary research. She gives a wonderfully detailed portrait of 1950s England, the open doors, lack of telephones, and local knowledge accrued by village inhabitants. And she shows what it is like to travel with an eight-year-old and a two-year-old (should I leave the latter sleeping in the car while I dash up to this castle with the other?).

One of my favorite scenes in How the Heather Looks is when an excited young librarian helps Bodger discover the site of T.H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose (1947), and an estate-sale handbill that details items which appear in this great classic. The novel has just come back into print (ACC Children's Classics, $24.95, 158 pp., age twelve and up), in an edition handsomely illustrated by Martin Hargreaves with a very welcome pictorial map of the Malplaquet estate on the endpapers. If you missed it the first time around, the novel involves a fetching young orphan named Maria, a wicked vicar and governess who are cheating her out of her estate, an absent-minded and wise professor, and wonder of wonders, a group of Lilliputians, related to those found by Gulliver. The writing is fabulous, as is the wry commentary on civics, authority, and children's education. This is the story of a girl coming into her power and learning how to manage it.

Were Bodger to go back to England today, I imagine she would put Garner on her "to visit" list as well as Philip Pullman, whose latest, I Was a Rat! (Knopf , $15.95, 163 pp., age eight and up) is, by turns, a disturbing, poignant, and farcical riff on the Cinderella story. The Amber Spyglass, his long-awaited conclusion to the trilogy, His Dark Materials, is officially "forthcoming," so if your favorite teen-agers have not yet read The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, make sure they do. Bodger might also drop in on William Mayne, another contemporary English giant unknown here. His 1976 A Year and a Day, to which Pullman's rat is weirdly indebted, has just been republished in the lovely Candlewick Treasure series (illustrated by John Lawrence, $11.99, 126 pp., age eight and up). This is a gorgeous, lyrical story of an unearthly child who stays, for a year and a day, with a Cornish family that is mourning a deceased son and on the precipice of birthing a new one. It is an astonishingly subtle exploration of childhood consciousness, as embodied in the family's twin girls.

I have been neglecting picture books, and will mention a few new ones in closing. Allen Drummond's Stories Told by Mother Teresa (Element, $15.95, 24 pp., age three and up), is a good way to begin a conversation with your child about the works of mercy and global poverty. Drummond managed to translate Moby-Dick into a picture book without losing its edgy argument with God, so he is, unsurprisingly, very good here at capturing the Christian joy and hope at the heart of Mother Teresa. His always oddly scaled drawings are teeming with life and energy.

Benny's Had Enough, written by Swedish author Barbro Lindgren, and illustrated by Olof Landstrom (R & S Books, $14, ages two to six) finds a pig in rebellion against his fastidious mother. A toddler struggling against mom is not an innovative subject but it is an essential and inexhaustible one. Here it is given an especially fine treatment. I particularly liked the way the writer and artist integrate the artifacts of contemporary life (computers, cell phones, satellite dishes) without being cutesy. Landstrom draws in the economical and witty manner of James Marshall, Jules Feiffer, and William Steig- artists who know that less can be more.

Basket Moon (written by Mary Lyn Ray, Little Brown, $15.95) is Barbara Cooney's one hundred tenth, and final, picture book. Cooney (Miss Rumphius, Eleanor, Island Boy) died March 10, in Maine, at the age of eighty-three. Her illustrations for this story about a family of Taconic basket makers are historically detailed, technically graceful, and faithful to the emotional reserve of rural laborers. These values are hallmarks of Cooney's work. Her understatement and gravitas brought an emotional depth to picture books, and reach their apotheosis here. Look for the picture of the mother comforting her son, after he returns from his first trip to the city, having learned that the world regards him as a hick. In this picture, you can hear the silence, painful and reparative.

Daria Donnelly is Commonweal's associate editor.