Griffiths' understanding of how it feels to be a child is extraordinary, and her writing is as vivid as poetry
Mail on Sunday
I didn't just read this book; I revelled in it. Playful and polemical, emotional and imaginative. As vital as play itself
Independent
A subterranean book. We excavate it to refind the secrets of childhood, our own, and many other childhoods in times and places far from ours
John Berger Kith could have been written by no-one but Jay Griffiths. It is ablaze with her love of the physical world and her passionate moral sense that goodness and a true relation with nature are intimately connected. She has the same visionary understanding of childhood that we find in Blake and Wordsworth, and John Clare would have read her with delight. Her work isn't just good
it's necessary
Philip Pullman Jay Griffiths writes with such richness and mischief about the one thing that could truly save the world: its children
K. T. Tunstall An impassioned, visionary plea to restore to our children the spirit of adventure, freedom and closeness to nature that is their birthright. We must hear it and act on it before it is too late
Iain McGilchrist Scintillating, passionate, supremely honest. Adults and children need more books like this
Literary Review
Jay Griffiths is one of our most poetic and passionate critics of the ways of civilisation. Provocative, illuminating and shamelessly romantic
Theodore Zeldin