The Scarecrows
The Scarecrows is a young-adult novel by Robert Westall, published by Chatto & Windus in 1981. It is a psychological novel with a supernatural twist, featuring a thirteen-year-old boy's reaction to his mother's courtship and remarriage six years after his father's death. It deals with themes of rage, isolation and fear. Beside the inner themes, it "tells of a boy and his family brought to the brink of destruction by sinister external forces" and it may be called a ghost story. Its US Library of Congress Subject Headings are remarriage, stepfathers, and horror stories.
Westall and The Scarecrows won the annual Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Thus he became the second writer with two such honours, having won the 1975 Medal for The Machine Gunners.
William Morrow and Company published the US edition under its Greenwillow Books imprint within the calendar year.
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