After my daughter received our first book by John Patience as a gift (it was ‘Parson Dimly’s Treasure Hunt’), I started looking everywhere for the other books about Fern Hollow. I was REALLY impressed with both the illustrations (completely different then the typical, ugly, vulgar pictures that I find in most childrens’ books nowadays) and the story.
The other thing that struck me was that, amazingly, we still had some books for children, in which the church building is not only mentioned and shown in the pictures, but plays an important role in the story. I was very disappointed that new books by John Patience were not available, I mean that he wrote them in the 80-ties and they were out of print since then. Luckily, I was able to buy the used copies of the other Fern Hollow books on Amazon. I became a huge fan, as the illustrations in all of these books are as beautiful as the stories themselves. None of them was disappointing. I even remember thinking that if I were an illustrator of children books (unfortunately I am not), I would like to to illustrate the books exactly like John Patience! 🙂
Now, the big news that I found out about recently, is, that last year, in 2019, John Patience started publishing his books again. I have not bought any of the newly printed, because we have them already in the used versions, but they are available now on Amazon. I am waiting for the newly printed books from his other series, ‘Rainbow’s End’, but this is different subject. I don’t want to mix things up too much.
John Patience’s illustrations are fantastic, they are exactly what I would call the real children book pictures. You have to see the SHOES in his illustrations. I have never seen such interesting shoes anywhere. I would not mind wearing a pair like these myself 🙂