["Greenstone"] is a fable for adults by an author who, since her extraordinary first work of fiction, "Spinster," has treated the novel as fresh territory rather than exhausted terrain….

[Ashton-Warner] has passionately held convictions about the education of the young, and the channeling of destructive energies into creative ones. It is not too surprising, then, that this former instructor of 5- and 6-year-olds, has chosen the vessel of the fairy tale of This Side and That Side, where "reality … is unacceptable and seldom used as a workable fact," to contain her vision of a loving, eccentric "ideal" family, and her dream of two different but complementary cultures, the Maori and the Western….

A good deal of credit for the tone of the family belongs to Puppa's brilliant bedtime allegories. They are the highlights of the novel, with just the proper amounts of fantasy, morality and irony. Story time...