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Title: Five Children and It by E. Nesbit, Paul O. Zelinsky ISBN: 0-688-13545-5 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (15 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: sadly, this classic does not stand up to the test of time
Comment: Edith Nesbit is a charming writer. She tells her story with wit and humour, and interjects sly digs that engender a wink and a smile, but while the premise is timeless and interesting, the prose is extremely dated, making the book a bit tedious to read for any length of time. Also, the ideas and prejudices exhibited by the characters date the material.
The five siblings of the title, who have found a Sand-fairy willing to grant them one wish a day, continually make silly wishes that get them into trouble. Their first wish is to be "as beautiful as the day". Right there you get a sense of the book's outdated charm. This is of interest more as a tribute to a talented children's writer of a bygone era rather than for its own sake.
I wanted to enjoy this classic, but I found it hard slogging through. That is just my opinion, however, but I'd suggest you read a bit of the text before purchasing it unless you're already familiar with, or particularly interested in, author Nesbit.
Caveat: The occasional black-and-white line drawings are by H.R. Millar, not the Paul Zelinsky watercolors promised in the Editorial Reviews section.
Rating: 4
Summary: My review of "Five Children and It"
Comment: This book is about Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother who discover a Psammead,
or Sand-fairy, who agrees to grant the children one wish per day.
Soon, their wishes start to turn quite unlike what they expected.
Then, an accidental wish has terrible consequences, and the kids
are faced with a hard choice: to let an innocent man be charged
with a crime, or to lose their gift of magical wishes.
I read this book in one day, and I thought it was pretty good.
This book turned out to be fairly interesting.
I would probably read "Five Children and It" again.
Rating: 3
Summary: A cynic's delight
Comment: I doubt I would have liked "Five Children and It" even as a child: an ordinary child's troubles are so much more troublesome than the challenges these kids face, it's almost (but not quite) funny. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane live in a countryside mansion replete with servants, they take trips to toy stores where they can buy whatever their hearts desire (the author informs us that this is the way children ought to be brought up), and inside a gravel-pit they have found a prehistoric sand-fairy that grants them wishes, one each day, but all their wishes have been turning out rotten so far. Well, boo hoo.
It isn't the concept that bothers me; it is the execution. Baum's and Carroll's heroines face comparable situations, but neither authors' books evoked such negative reactions from me. The reasons why the children's wishes fail I found especially abominable: when peerless beauty is wished for, the maid won't let them in since they look like "eyetalian monkeys"; when wealth is asked for and antique guineas appear by the bushel, the kids are arrested for thieves; when stolen jewellery magically reappears, it is Beale, the gameskeeper, who is immediately and incontrovertibly the chief suspect; when the four wish (accidentally) for the baby to grow up, the Lamb (Or Devereuz, or Hilary, or St Maur, as he should be rightly called) becomes a snappish fop. Nesbit draws miscellaneous moralistic lessons from her tale ("I cannot pretend that stealing is right"), but what use are these lessons when you are arrested whether or not you tell the truth? I would much rather Nesbit turn a cynical eye on the people she is describing, instead of using her keen powers of observations to weave an antithetical yarn.
At least her prose is reasonable enough. Nesbit's language is lucid, and while her sentence structure is rather sophisticated, it is not unduly so. Sadly, the same cannot be said of her characters. The four children who are the novel's protagonists are essentially the only developed characters, and while they are developed rather well, with plausibility and realism, they are bland. They are honest, noble, polite, friendly, sociable, and well-off; they treat the servants and people of lower station as functionaries, tools, ways of getting from A to B, and so does the author. Thus, there is little desire on the reader's part to come to know them better. They allow little conflict, little empathy. I'm probably the first to levy the charge that they have little wit and, if not for the fact that the wishes disappear at sundown, they would have great difficulty dealing with ther wishes.
But more about those wishes: it is quite surprising how many of them are accidental. In fact, there is little premeditated wishing going on past chapter six: otherwise, Nesbit would have been hard-pressed to find a reason for the children to wish for marauding Indians. What lesson are we, as readers, to draw from this? "Word your wishes carefully?" I'm reminded of the movie "Big," in where a twelve-year-old wishes to be grown-up to impress an older girl, and instead becomes Tom Hanks and scares the heck out of everybody. Just once I'd like a book where the characters get their hearts' true desires and have to come to terms with THAT.
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Title: The Enchanted Castle (Puffin Classics) by Edith Nesbit ISBN: 0140367438 Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: July, 1995 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: The Story of the Amulet (Puffin Classics) by H. R. Millar, Edith Nesbit ISBN: 0140367527 Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: The Phoenix and the Carpet (Puffin Classics) by H. R. Millar, Edith Nesbit, Patricia MacDonald ISBN: 014036739X Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: The Railway Children (Puffin Classics) by C. E. Brock, Edith Nesbit ISBN: 0140366717 Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $3.99 |
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Title: The Magic World (Puffin Classics) by Edith Nesbit ISBN: 0140367659 Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: August, 1996 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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