<P> Eva Maria Mauter in her 2006 MA thesis Subjective Perspectives in Ian McEwan's Narrations writes that The Daydreamer gets neglected in treatment about McEwan's works because it is a children's novel . </P> <P> David Malcolm in Understanding Ian McEwan (2002) writes that in the novel Peter, in his unconstrained world, moves between ordinary and impossibly fantastic situations . He compares it to First Love, Last Rites (1975), McEwan's first collection of short stories, because they both contain exciting, frightening, and loose worlds . </P> <P> American novelist David Leavitt in The New York Times praises McEwan's imagination, but writes that "fantastic passages" are infrequent and a larger portion is devoted to charting the "everyday calamities of Peter's suburban life", that the staples of the genre "get dutifully dragged out for a rehash ." He opines that like most authors of adult fiction who then went on to write children's books, McEwan has a tendency to talk down to the reader . Ending the review, Leavitt concluded that McEwan is at his best when he simply writes, not when he is "writing for children". Paul Taylor writes in The Independent that McEwan, whose early novels concerned "dark and deviant" material, was "too strenuously engaged in keeping the sweetness - and - light levels high". Robert Winder in the New Statesman calls the novel a "lovely children's book...which captures the gulfs between children and grown - ups more vividly than he does (in Atonement)". Tom Shone in The New York Times writes that the book "had a nice Roald Dahl - like streak of malice to it". </P> <P> The book was marketed as an adult book in Italy, where it sold well . </P>

Who do you think has the greatest impact on the narrator of the daydreamer