Half Magic by Edward Eager, 1954, 1982.

Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha are siblings living in the 1920s. Their father is dead, and their mother works for a newspaper. While their mother is at work, Miss Bick takes care of the house and the children, although she isn’t really good with children. The children are often free to amuse themselves on their own during the summer, and they like to pick out books from the library for entertainment. They particularly enjoy the fantasy books by E. Nesbit (a real author, and they reference her real books during the story), and they wish that exciting, magical things like the ones that happen in her stories would happen to them.

They get their wish (and a great many others) when Jane finds a strange coin on the sidewalk that they mistake for a nickel at first. By accident, they discover that this coin grants wishes, but it has a peculiar habit of only granting half of what a person wishes for (and the coin seems to interpret the idea of “half” pretty liberally, depending on the type of wish, so results can be pretty unpredictable).

Jane is so bored after she finds the coin that she wishes that there would be a fire for some excitement. Suddenly, the children hear a fire engine and discover that a child’s playhouse had caught fire. It could have been coincidence, except that their mother borrows some change from Jane, getting the magical coin by accident. While she is visiting the children’s aunt and uncle and finds their conversation boring, she wishes that she were at home, but finds herself unexpectedly by the side of the road halfway home. She is confused but thinks that she must just be very tired or something and forgot that she was walking home. She ends up accepting a ride from a very nice man who happened to be passing her on the road and thought that she looked lost and confused.

These early experiences and a series of odd wishes Mark makes when he doesn’t realize that he has the coin demonstrate to the children not only that the coin is magical but that they have to be extremely careful what they wish for when they have it. They have to word their requests very carefully, asking for twice as much of anything they want in order to counteract the half magic of the coin. Even so, they can’t help but make mistakes and get themselves into trouble.

When Katharine uses her turn with the coin to take them back to the days of King Arthur, she ends up causing trouble and disrupting history by defeating Lancelot in a tournament. Fortunately, Merlin realizes what the children have done and forces them to explain themselves and show him the magic coin. After inspecting it, Merlin gives the children a stern lecture about interfering with the natural course of history. He uses the coin’s magic to undo what the children have done and further uses it to restrict the children’s wishes to affecting only their own time period. He warns them to be more careful about what they wish for, keeping their wishes smaller and more personal, adding that the coin’s magic will eventually be exhausted, so they should save their wishes for what is important.

There is one more disastrous experience when the children go to the movies (a silent film because this is 1920s), and Martha accidentally wishes that she wasn’t there while touching Jane’s purse, which holds the coin. Martha, of course, ends up being only halfway “not there,” almost like a living ghost, which terrifies onlookers. Straightening out that mess brings them into contact with Mr. Smith, the nice man who gave their mother a ride home. He owns a bookstore, and he enjoys fantasy stories as much as the children do. He becomes the only adult who knows that the children have been using magic, and he’s fascinated by it, enjoying witnessing their adventures.

When the children’s mother comes to pick them up, Mr. Smith is pleased to meet her again and invites the family to join him for dinner. Mr. Smith is obviously fond of the children’s mother, and most of the children like him, too. However, Jane is uneasy. It’s partly that she worries that Mr. Smith will interfere with their use of the magic coin and partly that she worries about his new relationship with their mother. Of the four children, only Jane, as the oldest, really remembers their father, and she can’t stand the thought that Mr. Smith might become their stepfather and take his place.

When Jane argues with the other children about Mr. Smith and rashly wishes that she belonged to another family, the other children call upon Mr. Smith to help them rescue Jane from her foolish wish, her unsuitable new family, and from herself.

In the end, Mr. Smith does marry the children’s mother, and even Jane is happy with the arrangement, having come to appreciate Mr. Smith much better.  Once their mother and Mr. Smith each have what they wished for most — each other and a happy family with the children — they forget about the magic coin.  Although none of the children realize it, the coin also grants Jane one final half-wish in which her father comes to her in a dream-like form, letting her know that he approves of her mother’s remarriage and the children’s new stepfather because he wants them all to be happy.  This gives Jane the reassurance she needs to fully accept Mr. Smith.  The children, deciding that the coin has given them all the wishes it’s going to, leave it in a convenient place for a new owner to find.

You don’t find out what happens with the coin’s new owner apart from when the children see a young girl pick it up and realize that it’s magic when she makes her first wish. However, there is a cross-over scene in another book in the series, Seven-Day Magic, which explains a little more about what happens next.  Books in this series frequently reference and sometimes parody other children’s books that were popular at the time they written, and individual books in the series even sometimes reference each other, even when the main characters have changed.

Speaking of literary references and parodies in this series, sometimes it’s a little difficult to tell for certain which scenes are really meant as parodies and which aren’t.  Knowing a bit about vintage children’s fiction helps, but there may be some scenes in the stories which can make modern readers a little uneasy.  One scene in the book that bothered me was near the beginning, when Mark wishes to be on a desert island.  This was before the children fully realize that the coin only grants half of a wish, so the children just end up in a desert, but not on an island.  The part that bothers me is that they are briefly kidnapped by a kind of wandering Arab man who seems to be planning to ransom or sell them.  This scene is like an old stereotype out of the sort of silent movies that the children would have been watching, and because of that, it was a little painful to read.  The man’s name is Achmed (still in keeping with the stereotype), and they keep referring to him as “Achmed the Arab,” in case you need reminding that that’s what he is.  They get out of their predicament with him by wishing for something that would make him really happy so that he’ll forget about them.  By then, they realize that they need to double their request in order to make the coin work properly, so their wish works.  The coin ends up giving Achmed a beautiful wife and “six plump Arab children” (in case you forgot that Achmed’s children would be Arab as well) and generally improves what Achmed owns, so Achmed becomes a happy family man and gives up his earlier, shady ways.  It’s eye-rollingly stereotypical and cliche, so I think it’s worth telling potential readers that this scene is there.

The cliches and stereotypes (not to mention the constant, unnecessary repetition of the word “Arab” just to remind you that that’s what everyone is, in case you were confused) in that scene were annoying, but unfortunately, things like that crop up pretty regularly in children’s literature from the 1950s and earlier when there are scenes that take place just about anywhere outside of the United States, Canada, or Europe.  That being said, there are a couple of things that make this scene easier to bear.  One is that Mark, realizing that the magic coin can get them out of this situation and that they have the power to put Achmed at their mercy, decides not to do it because it occurs to him that Achmed is probably a desperate man because he is poor.  Mark decides that Achmed would be a better person if he had whatever would make him feel the most fulfilled in life, so he wishes for that for him.  It’s nice that Mark sees him as being a person whose well-being needs to be considered, not just an enemy to be defeated.  Also, it occurs to me that it’s not completely certain that the desert they’re in is a real-life one, even in the children’s fictional world.  I think the assumption is that it is, like we’re supposed to assume that the world of Camelot that they visit is a real part of history, but it may not be.  In fact, the children in different books in this series in general sometimes get philosophical about their magical adventures, wondering about how their magical adventures fit into the real world around them or if they really do, and they never fully get all the answers.   Perhaps the coin took the children to their idea of what a desert or what Camelot would be like, not to those real places.  In 1921, there was a famous silent movie called The Sheik in which Rudolph Valentino played an Arab sheik named Ahmed (Achmed’s name could be a joke on that).  It’s not a movie for children, but it was very popular in the 1920s, and it inspired other movies with Arabian themes, at least a couple of songs, and probably a number of the stereotypes about Arabs of the time.  So, if the kids in the story were imagining an Arabian desert, it would probably be something resembling what they’d seen in movies like that.  This little adventure may have only taken place in the imaginary world, even from the children’s perspective, and the author may be poking fun at the notions children get from popular culture.  Even in the end, the children admit that there are many things they don’t understand about the coin and how it works, like where the other half of Martha went when she was only half there.   In a world where magic works, pretty much anything is possible.  Then again, since the entire book is fictional, it may be best not to worry too much about it.  Still, I just plain didn’t like this scene.  The rest of the book wasn’t so bad.

Overall, it’s a fun story.  Part of the fun for book lovers is in spotting the various literary references in the story because the children talk about the books they like and read and compare their adventures to ones they’ve read about.  The concept of the half-wishes also makes you think.  It’s worth pointing out that, although the children enjoy the general adventure of the coin, most of the children’s wishes, no matter how carefully they word them, don’t turn out the way that they expected, even when they get exactly what they asked for.  Mr. Smith marrying their mother is actually the best wish that comes true in the whole book.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).