This is the sequel to Mairelon the Magician. When the book begins, it has been about a year since Kim and Mairelon’s previous adventures. Kim has been living with Mairelon as his apprentice, and he has been teaching her both reading and magic. (In the previous book, Kim was living on the streets of early 19th century London. She did not know how to read, and at the end of the previous book, she learned that she had the ability to become a wizard, prompting Mairelon to take her on for training.) Although Kim enjoys spending time with Mairelon and appreciates what he’s teaching her, other aspects of life with Mairelon’s wealthy family are less appealing. Kim gets bored reading by herself while Mairelon continues his work with the Royal College of Wizards, and Mairelon’s aunt, Mrs. Lowe, is trying to turn Kim into a proper young lady. The pressures of the social niceties and obligations wear on Kim, and even more worryingly, Mrs. Lowe has been considering Kim’s marriage prospects.
In
order to be socially-acceptable, Mrs. Lowe thinks that Kim should be
considering a socially-acceptable marriage for her future. For most of her life, marriage was about the
last thing on Kim’s mind. She spent most
of her youth pretending to be a boy in order to be safer on the streets. Since she became Mairelon’s apprentice, the
challenges of reading and magic have occupied most of her time. When Mrs. Lowe brings up the subject of
marriage, the idea seems ridiculous to Kim.
With her poor background, she can’t imagine what kind of “respectable”
man would want to marry her, and she can’t imagine anyone among the upper-class
people of London she would want to marry.
However, she sees Mrs. Lowe’s point that she won’t be able to stay Mairelon’s
apprentice and ward forever. At some point,
she will need to decide what to do once her training with Mairelon is
complete. It’s a little worrying to her
that Mairelon (known to most people by his real name, Richard Merrill) hasn’t
discussed the future with her and doesn’t seem to be making any plans.
Then,
one night, Kim overhears someone breaking into the library in their house. At first, Kim can’t imagine what someone
would want in the library. She
interrupts the thief, and he manages to escape.
After colliding with her in the hallway, the thief leaves behind one of
his buttons and a small piece of wood that seems to be magic. When Mairelon examines the wood, he says that
it appears that someone stored a spell inside it temporarily, to be used by
someone else. Also, whoever put the
spell together didn’t do a very good job and probably didn’t really know what
they were doing.
As for
what the thief was looking for in the library, Mairelon discovers that he was
particularly looking through a collection of books that his father purchased
years ago from a French wizard who had come to England after fleeing the French
Revolution. In particular, the thief seems
to be trying to obtain the memory book that belonged to the wizard’s wife. A memory book is exactly what it sounds like –
a book that that keeper would carry around with him or her and use to record certain
things that he or she would particular want to remember, a little like a journal
but often containing bits of important instructions, like notes about favorite
recipes or cold remedies (not necessarily the entire recipe, just general
reminder notes) or, in the case of a wizard, notes about important spells.
As they
investigate further, they learn that the wizard and his wife were part of a
larger society of wizards in France before the Revolution and that someone has
been trying acquire all of their old books and notes to learn the secret of one
of their spells, specifically a spell for sharing magical power. The person who wants this knowledge has a
nefarious purpose for it, and when Mairelon tries to interfere with his plans,
he uses the knowledge he has acquired to block Mairelon’s own magic! This spell and its power-hungry master has
already harmed other magicians, and now, Mairelon is in danger, too.
Meanwhile, Mairelon and his family have decided that, in order for Kim to truly be accepted in society, she must have a coming out party. The mystery and intrigue of the story mix with Kim’s new lesson in dancing, fashion, and social etiquette and the unexpected attention that she receives from young men as she begins truly mingling with the upper classes of society. Part of the mystery actually does involve the tensions between social classes, social mobility, and the extent to which birth and natural ability influence both. As Kim discovers that she is more acceptable in society and desirable to at least some of the upper-class young men, she also finds herself becoming jealous of the attention that Mairelon receives from young women in search of a good husband.
Like the first Mairelon book, this one is a nice mixture of mystery, fantasy, history, and comedy of manners. Both of the Mairelon books are a fun mixture of intrigue and humor, and this one also has a nice romantic element as Kim realizes that the only man she could ever see herself marrying is Mairelon. He’s eccentric and sometimes aggravating, but she loves him, and he has loved her all along, from the time when she was just a thief in the marketplace to her beginnings as a wizard and her transformation into a young lady. The book ends with Kim and Mairelon engaged to be married, and I’m sorry to say that there are no more books in the series after that. I really wish that there were because I think that there’s a lot more room for character development.
The
villain’s plot in this book hinges on the earlier established principle that wizards
are born, not made. Only certain people
have the ability to use magic. For some
people, like Kim, the ability to use magic can lift them to higher positions in
life, and it can be a source of real power.
For a person who is unable to use magic, there aren’t as many
options. The villain in this book thinks
that he’s found a way around the problem, but as Mairelon guessed from the
first, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing.
Even though this book has been a favorite of mine for years, I noticed something this time that hadn’t really occurred to me before. Mairelon’s aunt and mother in the book look at fashion and social obligations in a similar manner to people in high society and the business and legal professions (categories that overlap) in modern society, whereas Mairelon, who is considered pretty eccentric for a man of his family’s social standing, and other wizards seem to look at fashion and social obligations more like modern day academics, engineers, computer programmers, and other tech experts (at least, the ones I know because those are the kind of circles I tend to move in). Within each of these categories, some of these characters are more knowledgeable about fashion or more socially adroit or intuitive, but I noticed that there are two basic schools of thought going on here. For the high society types, fashion is essential and social activities are their main focus in life because that is how they build their connections, make the best possible marriage matches, gain support from others, and generally move up the social scale, always aiming to do a little better that they did before or set the stage for their children to move up. For the wizards and academic types, fashion and social obligations are of secondary importance because what makes the biggest difference in their lives is knowledge and skill. They even say that wizards are always considered socially acceptable because of their abilities and professional standing. Because of that, they’re socially allowed some eccentricities in personal habits and dress, and many of them take those liberties as much as possible because most of them are kind of socially introverted and prefer either the privacy of their own studies or the company of others who share their professions and interests.
At first, Mairelon doesn’t do much about Kim’s social education because it is not a subject that’s important to him and he knows that she can go pretty far in the field of magic by putting most of her efforts into building her magical skills. However, what Mairelon’s mother and aunt try to impress upon both Mairelon and Kim is that they both need some social skills in order to function in wider society. This is kind of like how tech experts may have some great ideas for creating new software or a new form of online business, but in order to get their ideas off the ground, they have to have some business knowledge or connections. Wizards may be allowed to be a little less social or more eccentric than other people, and it’s generally understood and expected, but they do much better if they learn to balance their preferences with society’s expectations. Because the people who normally occupy high society love the latest fashions and attending prestigious social events, they can’t understand why other people don’t. As the story says, they would leap to the assumption that a wizard, who is always acceptable in society, would naturally want to participate in society, and if the wizard didn’t, it must be that they are either not really a wizard or at least not a good one. In other words, they would assume that something was wrong with the person or their skills, not recognizing that their choices are simply a matter of personal taste. In order for Kim and Mairelon to truly rise in their professions, they also have to learn to manage their social obligations.
In the book, Renee is an example of a character who has learned this type of social, professional, and personal balance. She is a wizard, and as a single female, is regarded as something of an eccentric, but she understands that social skills are important. She is a longtime friend of Mairelon’s, and she lectures him somewhat on his social obligations and acts as something of a big sister/fashion mentor to Kim, along with Mairelon’s female relatives.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
This young adult book takes place in an alternate history version of Regency England. In this world, magic is a normal and accepted part of society. “Wizard” is an accepted profession, and there is even a Royal College of Wizards dedicated to magic. Not everyone can be a wizard because not everyone has the ability to use magic. It is a skill that people are either born with or born without, similar to people who have an innate talent for art or music, compared to people who are born tone-deaf or color-blind.
In this early 19th century world, there is a teenage girl, Kim, who lives on the streets and survives by her own wits, taking whatever jobs she can and committing a little petty thievery whenever she needs to. She has spent most of her life dressing like a boy and pretending that she is one because life on the streets is even more precarious for a girl. For a time, she was part of a gang of child thieves run by a woman call Mother Tibb. As far back as Kim can remember, Mother Tibb was the only one who took care of her as a child. Kim has no memory of her parents or any knowledge about what happened to them. She doesn’t even have a last name. However, before the story begins, Mother Tibb was caught and hanged for her crimes. Some of the other child thieves were apprehended and put in prison or exiled to Australia, but Kim managed to escape. Since then, she has been on her own. So far, she has managed to avoid being pressured in to joining up with other gangs or turning to prostitution to survive, but the fear of that haunts her. Her future is uncertain.
At the
beginning of the book, Kim is hired to sneak into the wagon of a traveling magician
who is performing in the market and to see what he keeps among his
belongings. The man who hired her doesn’t
want her to take anything, but he is particularly eager to see if the magician
has a particular silver bowl in possession.
It’s a strange request, but the money that the man offers Kim is too
good to pass up.
However,
the magician, who calls himself Mairelon, isn’t quite what he seems. He is not just an ordinary traveling
entertainer using some sleight of hand to amuse people in the market. Kim discovers that he can do real magic as
she searches his wagon and is knocked unconscious by a real magical spell that
Mairelon uses to protect his belongings.
When Kim wakes up, Mairelon and his servant, called Hunch, have tied her up. Unlike Hunch, Mairelon has also realized that Kim is actually a girl, not a boy. The two of them question Kim about why she sneaked into the wagon, and she tells them the truth about being hired to do it. When she describes the man who hired her, it seems that Mairelon recognizes the description. The part about the silver bowl also unnerves him.
Surprisingly, Mairelon makes Kim an offer to come with him and Hunch when they leave London. He is fascinated by Kim’s skills in picking locks, even the lock on the booby-trapped trunk that knocked her unconscious, and he thinks that Kim might be useful to him and Hunch, perhaps helping with the magic act. In return, he offers to teach Kim some of his magic tricks. Hunch is dubious about Kim because she has obviously been a thief, and Kim also isn’t sure what to make of Mairelon. She knows that he’s hiding something, but she isn’t sure what. No one with real magical abilities like him would ordinarily be making a living with simple magic tricks in the market.
However, Kim does accept the offer because she’s been worried about one of the major criminals in the area, Dan Laverham, who has been showing too much interest in recruiting her. He is heavily involved with a number of criminal activities, and he knows that Kim is a skilled lock pick. If he found out that she was a girl, he would probably also press her into prostitution. Dan Laverham would be a good reason to get out of London for a while. Also, Kim realizes that if she learns a few magic tricks from Mairelon, she might be able to set herself up as an entertainer and make an honest living, safe no matter who finds out that she’s female. Besides, Kim realizes that if she’s not satisfied with the situation, she could always run away later.
Before
leaving London with Mairelon, she returns to the man who hired her, at Mairelon’s
suggestion, and tells him that she didn’t see a silver bowl in Mairelon’s wagon
(which is true because she was knocked unconscious and didn’t see anything in
the trunk). The man is angry, but Mairelon,
who followed her in disguise, helps to create a distraction so that she can get
away from the man. They leave London in
the middle of the night because Mairelon says that he was spotted by someone who
recognized him when he went out to get magic ingredients.
On the
journey, Kim gradually gets to know Mairelon and his situation. The silver bowl, which Mairelon does have, is
actually part of a set of magical objects which, when used together, can compel
people to tell the truth without interfering with their ability to answer
questions intelligently. Mairelon’s real
name is Richard Merrill, and he is, or was, part of the Royal College of
Wizards. Years earlier, the Royal
College of Wizards was analyzing this particular set of magical objects and the
unique spell that they control, when they were suddenly stolen, and Merrill was
framed for the theft. At the time, Merrill
was unable to prove his innocence (at least not without sounding as if he had
done something inappropriate with a lady, which he also did not do – they were
just together at the time of the theft because she was helping him and another
friend with a magical experiment), but he was also recruited by his friend in
the government to be a spy against the French, so the story of his supposed
theft gave him a plausible reason for wanting to leave the country. In the time since then, he and his friend
have continued to look into the matter of the theft, and they have made some
progress in tracking down the other pieces of the magical set. At the time that Kim met him, he was on his
way to the next piece of the set, a silver platter.
To
their surprise, however, they soon discover that someone has been making copies
of the platter. The copies are not
magical, but they do confuse the issue.
Who is making the copies and why would they want copies, since they do
not have the powers that the original has?
As Kim and Mairelon investigate, they crash a house party at a lavish
country estate and spy on a meeting of a rather inept society of druids. All the while, they are getting closer and
closer to finding the original thief.
I loved the combination of mystery, fantasy, history, and humor in this book! It’s one of my all-time favorites. It has a happy ending with Mairelon’s name cleared and the thief caught. They also discover that Kim has the ability to use magic, and Mairelon offers to take her on as his apprentice, saving her from the streets forever. There is a sequel to this book called Magician’s Ward, about Kim’s life and adventures as Mairelon’s student. The hints of romance in this book are also much stronger in the next one. There are only two books in this series, which is disappointing because the characters are so much fun, and I think that there is a lot more room for their development. By the end of the next book, Kim’s future is looking more certain, but her past is still murky. Originally, I had expected that there would be secrets revealed about Kim’s past because of her ability to use magic, possibly something that was passed on to her by her parents. However, by the end of the second book, Kim still doesn’t know who her parents were/are, and it doesn’t look like there’s any chance that she will ever know. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes, secrets are more tantalizing when you imagine the answers than when you actually find out.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Rachel and her younger brother, Scott, stop by the discount store on the way home to admire the model kits. Most of the model kits are too expensive for them to buy, but one kit has been put on discount, The Build-Anything Kit. The kids think it’s a good deal because they can use it to build more than one kind of model.
When they get it home and begin to play with it, they are confused at first. Scott tries to build a model stock car racer, but all the wheels and other pieces are all different sizes. Then, Rachel finds a double-headed hammer labeled, “sizer.” The kids discover that when they hit the model pieces with the hammer, they can make them bigger or smaller. Besides working on pieces, the sizer can also make people bigger or smaller. Rachel makes Scott smaller so that he can drive his stock car model around the room. Then, when he drives outside, she makes both him and the car bigger, so the car is the size of a normal car. A neighbor spots them in this strange car and calls the police, so the children are forced to shrink the car again quickly.
When they get home, they discover that they left the door open and that a man is trying to steal their tv set. Without thinking, Rachel hits him with the sizer and shrinks him. Now, they have to decide what to do with him before the situation gets worse!
At first, the kids keep the thief in a glass, but then they let him out and allow him to drive around in the stock car model. While they are trying to decide what to do with him, they take a look in the model box again and notice some pieces that weren’t there before. They look and feel like stone blocks, so they begin building a castle with them. To their surprise, the man they shrunk runs into the castle. They are worried about him, so they hit the castle with the sizer to make it bigger. Suddenly, the castle is as large as life, and they go inside to discover that they are back in medieval times. What will happen to the thief in the past, and will the kids get back home?
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
One rainy afternoon, Annie urges Jack to go to the tree house with her because she has a feeling that they will soon meet its mysterious owner. When they arrive, no one is there, so the kids start looking at the books. The day is cold and wet, and Annie shows Jack a picture of a sunny beach, saying that she wishes they were there. Soon, they find themselves on the beach.
They have fun at first, but then some pirates come to the beach, looking for a treasure buried by Captain Kidd. The evil pirate, Cap’n Bones, makes the kids prisoners aboard his ship until they figure out where the treasure is hidden from the clue written on the captain’s map.
The clue says that the treasure is hidden underneath the whale’s eye, and from the ship, Jack and Annie realize that the island is shaped like a whale with a big boulder for its eye. The kids make the pirate captain take them back to the island in exchange for telling him where the treasure is. While the pirates are digging for the treasure, a parrot flies over, saying, “Go back!” The pirates take that as a sign of an approaching storm and flee, leaving the kids behind.
A storm does come, but Jack still has difficultly tearing himself away from the treasure that they’ve uncovered. Finally, the parrot convinces him to leave, and he and Annie use the tree house to go home again.
Once they’re back in Pennsylvania, the parrot appears and turns into a woman and says that she’s Morgan le Fay. She is the owner of the tree house and the amulet. Besides being King Arthur’s sister and an enchantress, she is also the librarian of Camelot. She has been using the tree house to travel to other times to collect books that the scribes in Camelot can copy for their library. She put the spell on the tree house so that she can travel to some of the places in the books herself. The kids can use the spell only because Annie truly believes in magic and Jack really loves books. She and the tree house disappear as the kids head home, but Jack discovers that she left her amulet with him as a sign that she will come back.
I was surprised that the owner of the tree house turned out to be Morgan le Fay, both because an Arthurian character didn’t seem to quite fit with a magical children’s tree house and because Morgan le Fay wasn’t one of the good characters in the Arthurian legends. The exact nature of the character of Morgan le Fay changed through different retellings of the Arthurian legends, and she wasn’t always an adversary or villain, but she does do things in some of the stories that wouldn’t make her a good heroine for children’s literature. However, none of that matters in this series because, here, she’s just an enchantress from Camelot who is interested in books.
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
#1 Dinosaurs Before Dark by Mary Pope Osborne, 1992.
Eight-year-old Jack is walking home with his seven-year-old sister, Annie, when Annie spots a tree house in the woods that they’ve never seen before. In spite of Jack’s warnings, Annie climbs up into the tree house and yells down that there are a bunch of books in there. Jack loves books, so he also climbs up into the tree house to see what she’s found.
There are books in the tree house about all sorts of interesting times and places. When Jack starts looking at a book about dinosaurs, he wishes that he could see one himself. Suddenly, the tree house takes the kids back in time to a land filled with dinosaurs. The two of them have some hair-raising adventures as they try to figure out how to get back home, getting some help from a friendly Pteranodon when they need to escape from a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The kids figure out that the tree house will take them anywhere they want as long as they look at a picture of the place in one of the books and wish to go there. There is a book about Pennsylvania in the tree house with a picture of their home town in it, so all they need to do is to look at it and wish they were there in order to go home.
While they are still in the land of the dinosaurs, Jack finds a gold amulet with the letter M on it. He thinks it belongs to whoever owns the tree house, so he picks it up and brings it back with them, although by the end of the book, the kids still don’t know who it really belongs to. The ownership of the tree house is something that they eventually figure out through their adventures with it. (See book #4 in the series for the answer.)
Drac and the Gremlin by Allan Baillie, pictures by Jane Tanner, 1988.
The great thing about this book is that you really need to look at the pictures in order to get the full story. If you read the text alone, it sounds like a magical space adventure story, but when you see the pictures, you realize that it all takes place in a girl’s imagination as she and her younger brother play in their backyard. The book never mentions the children’s names (or directly talks about reality at all). The girl calls herself “Drac, the Warrior Queen of Tirnol Two”, and her younger brother “the Gremlin of the Groaning Grotto.”
Drac begins by trying to capture the The Gremlin. She pursues him across the jungles, but when she finally traps him, she receives a message from the White Wizard. The White Wizard is being attacked by “General Min” (their cat, Minnie) and desperately needs her help! Drac persuades the Gremlin to help her.
The two of them get into Drac’s “anti-gravity solar-powered planet hopper” and race to the rescue! They arrive just in time to save the White Wizard in her current form (a moth).
But, they are soon facing another peril: “The Terrible Tongued Dragon” (their dog)! Drac is almost overcome by the dragon, but the Gremlin saves her just in time!
Their adventure ends at the palace, where the “White Wizard” (their mother) rewards them with “the Twin Crimson Cones of Tirnol Two” (ice cream).
I love the way that the adventure unfolds in the children’s minds and the pictures show what is actually happening to the children, as their mother and everyone else sees them. The pictures are beautiful and realistic. The book was originally published in Australia, and I recognize some of the plants from pictures that a friend of mine there has sent me!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Greta
loves fog and always has, although other people can’t understand it. When she is ten years old, she begins to get
the sense that there is something in the fog that she should find. One day, when she goes looking for a lost cow
from her family’s farm, she sees a house in the fog that isn’t there when the
fog is gone. Apparently, there used to
be a house on that site, but it’s gone now.
Except when there’s fog.
From
then on, Greta loves to walk in the fog.
When she does, she meets people from the past. One day, she meets a woman named Laura Morrill,
who recognizes her as being from the Addington family and says that her name
must be Greta. According to Laura, there’s
always a Greta in every generation of Addingtons and that there’s always a
child in every generation who has a great love of fog. Greta’s ability to use the fog to travel back
in time and see her town as it once was is apparently inherited.
Greta
makes friends with Retha Morill, Laura’s daughter. However, when Mrs. Morrill gives her a piece
of pie to take home, it disappears, making Greta realize that she can’t bring
things from the past to the present.
Retha’s parents seem to realize it, too.
When Retha offers her a little silver egg cup to take home, Mrs. Morrill
suggests that perhaps it would be better for Greta to leave it at their house
and use it when she comes. Greta also
has the feeling that, when the fog starts to lift, she needs to go home, and
Mrs. Morrill agrees.
On another day, Greta and Retha spot an older girl in the woods. Retha seems to know who she is and calls out to her, but she runs from them. They try to catch up to her, but she gets away, and Retha is upset. It turns out that the girl is named Ann, and she was falsely accused of theft. When it was discovered that she hadn’t stolen anything, the townspeople had tried to find her, but she’s been hiding from them ever since, too afraid to come back. At first, people had thought that maybe she had gone to another town to find work, but now that they know that she’s been living alone in the woods, they’re worried about her. The story also upsets Greta because she has heard a local ghost story about a girl who haunts the woods after being falsely accused, and Greta takes that to mean that Ann will die. The Morrills assure her that they will look out for Ann.
Greta
is tempted to talk to Retha about her mysterious time traveling in the fog, but
Retha stops her from talking about it. Retha
says that even her mother doesn’t want to talk about where Greta goes while she’s
not with them, only saying that both men who go to sea and the women who wait for
them on shore “have to learn to be content and at peace shut in by their
horizon.” To Greta, that means that she
should be content with wherever she is while she’s there and with the fog that
allows her to see her friends in the past.
The
more Greta visits the Morrills, the more she gets caught up in the lives and troubles
of the people living in the past. At one
point, Greta and Retha talk about some of the sad things that have happened to
people the Morrills know, and Retha asks Greta if there is sorrow where she
lives. Greta has to admit that there
is. People generally do have their
troubles, no matter when they live.
Retha says that her mother says that living and dying are both natural
things, so there is no use being sad about them, except when the death is an
unnatural one, like in a war. There is
no war going on in Retha’s time, but Greta lives during the time this book was
written, in the middle of World War II.
Greta is aware of the war and says that sometimes people have to fight
whether they want to or not, but Retha doesn’t think so. Greta realizes that she can’t make Retha
understand the circumstances of the world in the future.
However,
as Greta’s twelfth birthday approaches, she has the feeling that things are changing. Her birthday will be the last time that she
can visit her fog friends, but they give her a special present to remember them
by. Greta’s father seems to know what
Greta has been doing in the fog, and he reveals to her, without actually saying
it, that he once did the same thing himself.
He says that when people grow up, they leave the things of childhood
behind, but each of them is able to keep a special birthday gift from the past
as a reminder that some things do last.
The ending of the story implies that, although Greta’s adventures in the fog were real, not purely imaginary, she has to give them up to make room for the new things that will enter her life as she grows up. Her life lies in her present and future, so she can’t keep going back to the past. However, her experiences with her friends in the past are part of what has made her more mature, and they will stay with her forever.
The book is a Newbery Honor Book. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
The idea of magic and magical adventures ending at a certain age, as the person begins to grow up, is a classic idea in children’s literature. Sometimes, in other books, it’s implied that the reason this happens is because the “magic” was all imaginary, and the child in the story grew out of that particular kind of imagining, but that isn’t the case in this story. The explanation in this book for why the magic has to end is simple but makes sense. The characters don’t really analyze the issue too deeply, simply taking it in stride. We never find out why this particular family seems to have this tradition of going back in time in the fog as children, and the characters seem to decide that there is no reason to find out why.
Unlike in some modern books, there doesn’t seem to be any particular mission for Greta (or her father or any other generations before her) to fulfill in her time traveling. Greta is mostly an observer of the events in the past, not really participating in them directly or changing them in any way. She doesn’t even seem to influence the thoughts or attitudes of people in the past much. When she talks about the concept of war with Retha, she doesn’t try to change Retha’s mind about it or tell her about World War II and other future events because she realizes that each of them really belongs to two different times and sets of circumstances, and each of them needs to live in their own time, dealing with their own situations. It is their differing situations which give them their attitudes. The Morrills seem to be aware that Greta comes from the future, but they treat the subject carefully, never directly stating where she is from, just hinting at it. From they way they act, it seems as though they’ve met other members of Greta’s family before, but again, the ties between their two families (if any) are never explained, and none of them seems to want to delve too deeply into the matter. For the most part, they just seem to take the whole situation as being a natural part of life in their families and in the area where they live, something just to be enjoyed and not questioned. In fact, some of their attitudes seem to imply that they fear questioning too deeply, as if that in itself might end the magic too soon.
Although the story leaves the reasons behind the time traveling very open and unresolved (probably, other children in Greta’s family will be doing this in the future, also not really knowing why), it is really a very calm story. Not having a special mission to complete in the past leaves Greta free to simply enjoy the company of the people in the past, observing their lives without the stress of needing to solve their problems for them, and readers can similarly enjoy the ride without worrying that anything really bad will happen. You do end up being interested in what happens to some of the characters, like the woman who is in danger of losing her family’s home, but events unfold in the way Greta knows they will. She’s sad when she knows that certain people are going to die (not the woman whose home was in danger, that works out well) and there is nothing she can do about it, but it all seems to be part of the natural circle of life, something that matures Greta when she realizes it.
One of the fun things that I liked about the book were some of the unusual first names of the characters, like Retha, Eldred (Retha’s father), and Ardis (Mrs. Stanton).
Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, 1943, 1947.
This book is actually two books in one. The title Bed-Knob and Broomstick is the one used for editions that include both the first book, The Magic Bed-Knob, and the sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks. Together, these two books were the basis for the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks, although the plot of the movie is considerably different from the two books. Because the movie is based on both of the books at once and because I read the combined edition, I’ll explain the plots of both of the books in one post.
There are two major differences between the movie and books that change many other things about the plot. The first one is that there is no mention of World War II in the books, even though the books were written during that time. Miss Price was not studying magic to help the war effort, and the children were only in the countryside for vacation, not because they were evacuated there. Also, in the books, Emelius Jones (Emelius Brown in the movie) was a man they met when they traveled through time, not a man living in London during their own time. He was not involved in Miss Price learning magic, although the two of them do end up together in the end.
The Magic Bed-Knob
At the beginning of the first book, the three Wilson children – Carey (who is described as being “about your age”), Charles (“a little younger”), and Paul (six years old) – are spending the summer with their Aunt Beatrice in Bedfordshire. There is never any mention of the children’s father in the books. Probably, their father is dead, although he might have left the family and went to live elsewhere or may be fighting overseas, although there is no mention of that in the book, making me think that it is probably not the case. The children apparently live with only their mother in London, and because she works, she always needs to find somewhere for them to stay during the summer, when they’re out of school. (This is a major plot point in both of the books. In the Disney movie, the three children are orphans who have no memory of their birth parents, and their guardian was killed in a bombing shortly before they were evacuated to the countryside. You only get their full backstory if you see the anniversary edition of the movie that includes the deleted scenes.) While the children stay with Aunt Beatrice, they enjoy playing in the countryside, and one day, they happen to meet Miss Price, who they find with an injured ankle.
Miss Price is a respectable spinster from the village who gives piano lessons and is often seen riding around on her bicycle. When they find her hurt, Carey says that they should get a doctor for her, but Miss Price insists that she doesn’t want one. Instead, she just asks the children to help her get home. As she starts to lean on Carey and Charles, Paul picks up a broom nearby. The older children thought it was just an old garden broom, but Paul calmly says that it belongs to Miss Price because it’s what she rides around on. The others are shocked, but Paul simply says that that he’s seen her improve in her flying, so Miss Price knows that he’s seen her riding her broom more than once. Miss Price is worried that everyone in the village will know now that she’s a witch, but Paul hadn’t even told his brother and sister what he’d seen.
The children help Miss Price get home, and they allow their aunt to think that Miss Price simply fell off of her bicycle. When the children are able to speak to Miss Price privately, they ask her directly if she’s a witch, and she admits that she’s studying to be one. She says that she’s had some talent for magic since she was young, but she never really had the time to develop it. The children are convinced that, while Miss Price might be a witch, she’s not a wicked one, and she says that’s true, that she started too late in life to be that way and that wickedness doesn’t come naturally to her. However, she’s still worried that the children might tell people about her magic.
Carey is the one who suggests that Miss Price give them a magical object as part of their pledge of secrecy (unlike in the movie, where it was Charlie’s idea), with the idea that, if they ever told anyone that she’s a witch, the magic would stop. Charles suggests that Miss Price could give them a magic ring that would summon a slave to do their bidding, but she says that she couldn’t manage that and that she has a better idea. Miss Price asks the children if they have anything on them they can twist, like a ring or a bracelet. The only thing they have is a bed-knob that Paul twisted off the end of his bed (basically, because he discovered that he could).
Miss Price says that the bed-knob will do nicely, and she casts a spell on it that will allow the children to travel to the destination of their choice when they put it back on the bed and give it a twist. If they turn it in one direction, they can travel in the present time, but turning it the other way can send them to the past. Also, because Paul was the one who had the bed-knob, he’s the only one who can make it work. Miss Price isn’t troubled by Paul’s young age because she thinks that it’s best to learn magic young, although she warns the children to be careful.
Because it’s Paul’s bed-knob, Carey and Charles give him first choice of where to go, but they think the places he wants to go sound mundane. He wants to either see a museum exhibit that the others saw without him once or to go home and see their mother in London. Carey and Charles try to persuade him to go someplace more exciting, but Paul insists that he wants to go home.
The bed whisks the children home to London, but when they get there, their mother isn’t home. Apparently, their mother has gone away for the weekend herself, and the children find themselves alone on their bed, in front of their house, on a foggy night. A policeman bumps into them, and when he demands to know who they are and where the bed came from, he doesn’t think it’s funny when they say, “Bedfordshire.” He takes them to the police station to spend the rest of the night. Fortunately, they find a way to get back to the bed and use the spell to return to their aunt’s house before they’re missed in the morning. It’s not quite the adventure that the children had been hoping for when they started out, but it’s just the beginning of their amazing summer!
However, magic turns out to be more dangerous than they thought. Their next adventure takes them to an island with cannibals (yeah, one of those scenes, sigh – I think that the island of talking animals in the movie was more fun), and they narrowly escape after Miss Price has a duel of magic with a witch doctor. Their magical adventures create problems that the children can’t explain to their aunt without giving away Miss Price’s secret. Eventually, their messes and wild stories cause their aunt to send them home to their mother. Miss Price considers that magic might cause more problems than it solves and tells the children that she’s thinking of giving it up for awhile. However, Paul keeps the bed-knob in the hopes that their adventures aren’t done yet.
Bonfires and Broomsticks
In Bonfires and Broomsticks, two years have passed since the children’s first adventures, and Aunt Beatrice has died. Carey and Charles, worried that Paul would talk too much about their magical adventures, tried to convince Paul that it was all just a dream, although they weren’t very successful.
Then, the children see an advertisement in the newspaper that Miss Price is offering to board a couple of schoolchildren in her house for the summer for a fee. The children’s mother works, and she always has to find somewhere for the children to spend the summer, when they’re not in school. They still have the bed-knob, so they tell their mother that they want to visit Miss Price, hoping they can have more adventures with her. At first, their mother doesn’t understand why they would want to visit Miss Price so badly, but since she seems like a nice, respectable woman and an old friend of Aunt Beatrice’s, she agrees.
Miss Price is happy to have the children stay for the summer, but they are disappointed when they learn that she was really serious about giving up magic. The children discover that Miss Price bought the old bed that they had used for their previous adventures at the estate sale after their aunt’s death. She’s been sleeping on it in her own room. They want to try the bed-knob on the bed, but Miss Price takes it from them. She tries to make their summer vacation a normal vacation with normal activities, like picnics and croquet.
But, even Miss Price can’t resist the opportunity to try the bed-knob one last time. One morning, Carey and Charles discover that Paul and Miss Price have traveled somewhere on the bed without them. When the two of them confront Paul about it, he says that they only went to a nearby town, just to see if the spell on the knob still worked. Carey and Charles understand, but Carey thinks that if they got to use the bed once more, she and Charles should have one more turn. She especially wants to try going into the past, which was something they hadn’t had a chance to try last time. Miss Price is reluctant, but finally agrees after Carey pressures her about it.
The children travel to London of 1666 (ending up there accidentally, when they were aiming for the Elizabethan era), where a man named Emelius Jones has been living as a necromancer. When he was young, he studied magic under a mentor who, as he was dying, finally told him that everything he learned was fakery. It was all an act that he used to get money from gullible people, although it paid very well. The old man leaves Emelius his business, but Emelius is always nervous, worrying both because someone might discover that it’s all a fake and because others might believe that it’s real and that he should be hung as a witch. The only reason why he stays with it is because he has no other business to follow.
The children meet Emelius after ending up lost and stopping at his house for directions. The children can see how nervous and unhappy Emelius is, and they ask him about himself, discovering that his home town is actually close to where they’re staying with Miss Price. They reveal to him that they are from the future and invite him to come home with them for a visit.
Miss Price isn’t happy to see that they’ve brought someone back from the past with them, but she ends up liking Emelius. Before sending him home, they learn that Emelius’s aunt, who lived near to where Miss Price now lives, died the same day that Emelius left London in the past, which is coincidentally shortly before the great fire that destroyed a good part of the city. They know that Emelius’s London lodgings will likely be destroyed in the fire as well, but at least he can move into the house that he will inherit from his aunt.
However, after they send him back to his own time, the children and Miss Price learn that Emelius never made it to his aunt’s house because he was executed for practicing witchcraft. Unable to leave poor Emelius to such a terrible fate, they come up with a plan to rescue him.
The combined book edition is available online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
Changing Emelius’s past also changes Miss Price’s future. Neither of them has ever married, and both of them have been lonely, and they come to the conclusion that the two of them were meant to be together. In deciding that they will live their lives together on Emelius’s aunt’s farm in the past, they put an end to the magical traveling bed. Only Paul can make the magic bed-knob work, and once he sends them into the past (not going with them), they can never return. But, Carey has one final vision of the two of them, being happy together, so she knows that they will be alright.
Overall, I preferred the Disney movie to the original books. I think the war-based plot was better than the children’s random travels to cannibal-filled islands (I never liked those tropes in children’s stories anyway) and other places. At one point in the books, Carey did speculate about the use of magic in war, but she rejected the idea because the notion of someone with the ability to conjure a dragon that could breathe mustard gas or who could turn whole armies into mice was just too horrible. The spell that Miss Price used against the Nazis in the movie was part of their plan to rescue Emelius in the second book, but I think the movie’s ending was much more exciting.
John and Susan are brother and sister, living in a perfectly ordinary town in Connecticut. They are tall, good-looking, and good in school and at sports, so they are generally popular and are often chosen for positions like class president. However, their home life is unusual because they are orphans who live with their grandmother, who sometimes requires them to look after her as much as she looks after them. Their grandmother isn’t very strong, but she is spirited and is sometimes tempted to do things that she probably shouldn’t do at her age, like climbing trees. Because John and Susan feel like they have to look after their grandmother, it’s sometimes difficult for them to get out and do some of the things that other children their age are doing, like going to parties. They’re glad when Barnaby and his sisters move to a house nearby because they make life more exciting.
Barnaby and his sisters, Abigail (called Abbie) and Fredericka, become friends with John and Susan. Their father is a singer in advertisements, and their mother is a realtor. Because their parents work a lot to make ends meet, the children are often left to their own devices. Barnaby is opinionated, stubborn, and sometimes hot-tempered, which causes him to get into fights at school, but John likes him because he’s imaginative and full of interesting ideas.
Barnaby wants to be a writer. He’s secretly writing a story of his own, and he encourages the others to read more. Before meeting Barnaby, John hardly read anything at all, and Susan was mostly into the Sue Barton books, about a young woman who becomes a nurse (a real series that was popular in the mid-20th century, realistic fiction). Barnaby introduces them to a whole new world of fantasy stories, full of adventure. One day, while visiting the library together, the children talk about the kinds of stories that they like and wish that they could find a really good book full of magic and kids that are like themselves. Their wish comes true in a peculiar way.
On impulse, Susan checks out a rather worn-looking book with a red cover, not really knowing what it’s about but thinking that it just looked kind of interesting. The librarian seems a little uneasy when she takes it and warns her that she can only keep that particular book for seven days, which is surprising because that’s the limit usually imposed on new books, not old ones.
On the way home, the children show each other what they got and read parts of their books aloud to each other. When Susan opens the red book, they are all startled to find out that the book is about them. It starts out just like the real life book and tells about their lives and backgrounds and has their conversation about books they like, word-for-word. The children can tell that this is a magic book, but even while the idea is thrilling, it makes them uneasy. There is nothing written beyond their conversation about books, and the book won’t let them turn pages to see what might come next or how their story will end.
As much as the children like the idea of being the stars of their own magical book, it’s worrying. They don’t know what they’re in store for, and they even worry briefly that maybe their entire lives are fictional, that they might just exist in someone’s imagination, although they don’t really believe that because they can remember their lives before the story began. Barnaby points out that the book specifically mentions that he and his sisters recently moved to the area, but he remembers having lived elsewhere before that.
The children carefully consider everything they had originally wished for in a book: that children, just like themselves, would be walking home from somewhere and a magical adventure would start before they even realized that it was happening and that they would have to figure out the rules of the magic in order to use it for their own purposes. Since the first part of their wish has literally (very literally) come true, they decide that they’re going to have to figure out what the rules of this magic are before they decide what to do next. Since looking ahead in the book seems to be against the rules, they decide that they will have to be very careful about anything they wish for next because their wishes seem to be what writes the story, and they need to discuss it first and come to an agreement about it.
Unfortunately, little Fredericka (the youngest of the children) is too impatient for discussion and immediately wishes for an adventure with wizards, witches, and magic, and she wants it to start right away so that they’ll know that the magic is really working. A minute later, a dragon suddenly appears and scoops up Fredericka, flying away with her!
The others try to figure out where the dragon came from, and it turns out that a stage magician who lives nearby was practicing his act at the time that Fredericka made her wish. When she wished for a magical adventure, the rabbit that the magician was supposed to pull out of his hat turned out to be a dragon. The magician, The Great Oswaldo, is mystified, but he’s destined to play the part of Fredericka’s requested wizard. The children ask him to help them, and he says he’ll try, although he’s not sure how.
As Oswaldo tries various tricks in his magic supplies, they don’t work in the way they usually do. Finally, he is able to make his landlady’s house fly after the dragon, much to the landlady’s horror (she’s cast in the role of the witch in Fredericka’s story). In the magical land where the dragon lives, the peasants inform them that the dragon is always carrying off girls and young women to eat them, and they have to think of something fast before Fredericka becomes his next meal!
This is where the children discover that the contents of the magical book change depending on who reads it. When the magician reads it, it’s full of magic spells. When the landlady, Mrs. Funkhouser, takes it from him, it has household hints. For the dragon, it’s all about dragons. Surprisingly, it’s Mrs. Funkhouser’s household hints that save the day, although it’s Oswaldo who gets most of the credit because one of his pet cats eats the dragon after Mrs. Funkhouser shrinks it.
Oswaldo and Mrs. Funkhouser decide to stay in the magic land (which the children think might actually be Oz, in its early days), where they are hailed as heroes, sending the children home by themselves with the help of Mrs. Funkhouser’s vanishing cream. As expected, this adventure is now written in the magic book when the children have another look at it (although Fredericka argues that the illustrations don’t really do her justice).
Susan, as the borrower of the book, says that she wants their next adventure to be calmer, the kind of everyday magic that just creeps up on you. This is the part of the story where it crosses over with the events in Half Magic (another book in the same series as this one). In these children’s world, Half Magic is a fictional book that they’ve read and liked. Susan’s requested adventure picks up where Half Magic left off, explaining what happened after the other four children (Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha) left their magic coin to be discovered by a new owner. Susan and her friends delight in explaining to the young girl who found the coin what it does. The girl says that she had thought that the coin might be magic, but was confused because she didn’t get her wish to go into the future and meet some other children. Because the coin only grants wishes by halves (interpreting that pretty liberally), Susan and her friends (who live in the future), came to meet her instead.
Once again (as is common in this series), it leaves the matter of what is fiction and what is reality open to question. Was it the girl’s wish that brought the other children to her, or their wish that took them into her story? Or Both? Was that fantasy story secretly real, or are Susan and her friends more fictional than they like to think? The author likes posing questions like this, but of course, you never completely know the answers, and in some ways, it hardly matters because the adventure doesn’t require anyone’s understanding for them to take place, which is something that, ironically, it has in common with real life – things frequently happen regardless of whether or not you understand the reasons why. Sometimes, figuring out how things work and to deal with them is about all you can do, never getting the complete “why” behind everything. That’s pretty much how all the stories in this series go.
After the children explain to the girl what the coin is and how it’s supposed to work, she makes a more careful, doubled wish to go to the future with the other children. Unfortunately, when they get there, she panics when she realizes that she forgot to bring her one-year-old baby brother with her and makes a hurried half-wish for him to be there, too. Because she didn’t wish right, what she gets is her brother at the age he would be in the other children’s time (about age 37) but still mentally the baby he was back in 1924 (the girl’s time). The “baby” is amazed when he realizes that suddenly he can walk and talk much better than he could before and that he’s suddenly much bigger and stronger than he used to be. He gets hold of the coin and refuses to give it back, telling his little “big” sister that he can do what he wants now, not what she tells him to do. Noting that he can even pick her up and carry her around now, he does that, with the others chasing after him to get the charm and bring him under control. (A somewhat similar incident, where a baby grows up too fast and is dangerously immature, happens in E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It – another instance of Edward Eager playing off her books.)
It’s chaos for awhile because a 37-year-old man who acts like a 1-year-old can’t help but attract attention, especially when he gets it into his head that he wants to drive a train. Eventually, they get the “baby” back under control and to his proper age, allowing his sister to take him back to their own time and plan her future adventures with the coin.
Then, Susan and John’s grandmother gets hold of the book, and it takes her and her grandchildren back in time, to when the grandmother was a young woman working as a prairie schoolteacher. Susan makes a wish for the other children to join them, and they help their grandmother and her students to survive a sudden blizzard. They come to appreciate their grandmother’s youthful personality and formidable spirit even more from the experience. They even get to meet their grandfather, who died before they were born, seeing him rescue their grandmother and her students when he was a young man.
Then, Abbie decides that she wants to try to help her father’s singing career. He typically has to work long hours and never makes very much money, just being part of the chorus on advertisements. She thinks things will be so much better if they can help him to be discovered as a great talent. The others are kind of doubtful about her plan because the book seems to send them on rather “bookish” adventures, related to other stories they’ve read or people’s memories, like in their grandmother’s case because her early life actually did somewhat resemble things from the Little House on the Prairie series (a series which the grandmother enjoys reading for that reason). The other children just don’t know what would happen if Abbie tries to use the book for something more modern and everyday, like their father’s career. She tries it anyway, with some unpredictable results.
During a recording at a television studio (which the children are present to witness), the magic makes their father sing wonderfully but he also does his singing part out of sync with the other singers. He’s sure that he is singing his part at the right time, but for some reason, the other members of the chorus are silent when he sings. The director gets mad at him for singing out of sync and messing up the performance, and the singer who was supposed to be the star gets mad about being upstaged, but the reviewers end up loving the performance. So, while at first it looks like the father is going to be fired, he ends up with more singing parts because of the episode. The only problem is that all the singing parts are silly jingles, like the typical advertising jingles he gets. While he’d welcome more money, he always dreamed of being able to get better parts. However, the magic isn’t quite done, yet. When Abbie meets a playwright who is looking for a new talent to sing in his play, it turns out that he has seen Abbie’s father on tv and likes his voice.
Abbie’s wish is so great and does so much for their family that the kids start thinking that it might be the end of the magic. The seven days are really up, and the book has to go back to the library the next day. However, John and Barnaby haven’t had their chance to wish yet, and each of them wants to have a turn before the book goes back. Barnaby even suggests that perhaps they can keep the book an extra day, turning it in late. Surely a little late fee isn’t too much to ask for an extra day of magic, is it? Abbie is afraid, though, that keeping the book overdue would be breaking the rules and that the magic might go all wrong. She’s right.
Even with the idea of keeping the book for extra time, John and Barnaby argue over which of them will get to go first. The book’s magic, angry about not being returned to the library, turns sour on them, causing them to fight. John angrily tells Barnaby that just because he’s usually the group’s idea man doesn’t mean that he’s the only one who’s allowed to have ideas. (Which, in a way, is something that Barnaby needs to hear because that’s part of the reason why he often gets into fights – he always thinks he knows best.) John and Barnaby fight over the book, and the book gets torn. John ends up with a few pages, and Barnaby gets most of the book, which he uses to make a wish that he refuses to tell to the others. Barnaby disappears, and the others realize that the pages that Barnaby is holding are the last few pages from the end of the book, still blank. Without them, the book can’t end, and Barnaby could end up stuck in the book forever! Can the others find him and get him (and the book) back before it’s too late?
Before the end of the book, John does prove that, although he might not be as quick to come up with ideas as Barnaby is, he does get good ones. After he and the others find Barnaby, John uses his wish to get them back home and to return the book to the library in a most unusual way. (Actually two unusual ways because he couldn’t quite make up his mind about which was best. Both of them are homages to incidents in E. Nesbit’s books.)
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Laura and her twin brother, James, are practical children who are fond of useful facts, but still have imaginations and appreciate fantasy stories. In this part of the Tales of Magic series, all of the previous books in the series are fictional books that the characters have read and enjoyed, and real magic may or may not exist, as the title suggests. All throughout their coming adventures, the children are never quite sure how much of what happens is magic and how much isn’t, but they’re bound for an amazing summer.
Laura and James’s family has recently bought a house in the country, and the story begins with the twins taking the train to their new town while their parents follow in the car with their luggage and their baby sister, Deborah. Laura and James haven’t seen the new house yet, but they know that it’s pretty old, and they speculate if it could be haunted or maybe even magical, like something from a fantasy story. James doesn’t think so. He thinks that magic, if it existed, is a thing of the past. Then, a strange girl on the train tells them that magic does exist. She insists that her grandmother is a witch and makes a comment about how they should “drop a wish in the wishing well, and wait and see!”
Laura and James don’t know what she means, but it turns out that there is an old well on the property of their new house. James ignores it, but Laura can’t resist giving the wishing thing a try. After struggling to come up with something appropriate to wish for, she finally writes a note that says, “I wish I had a kitten” and tosses it into the well. The next day, when they meet the boy next door, Kip (short for Christopher), they find a basket with two kittens in it sitting on the edge of the well. Kip figures that Lydia found the note that Laura wrote in the well bucket and decided to make her wish come true by leaving a couple of stray kittens for her.
It turns out that the girl from the train is Lydia Green. Kip says that she lives nearby with her grandmother. Lydia’s grandmother is an artist, and both of them are eccentrics. Lydia is kind of a wild child who likes to spend her time riding around on her black horse. She’s something of an outcast in the community, and she knows it. When the other children go to see her to ask about the kittens, Lydia seems prepared for them not to like her and for her not to like them, either. However, when she finds out that Laura’s names for the kittens were inspired by the book The Midnight Folk, she warms up to them because she also likes fantasy stories, and Laura offers to share the magic of the well with her.
James is more skeptical about Lydia and insists that she prove that there’s magic around, if her grandmother is really a witch. Lydia is reluctant at first, but then she shows the other children her grandmother’s garden. She insists that one of the plants in the messy garden (which does look like it might belong to a witch) can bring visions when it’s burned and maybe even a visitor from another world. (Sounds trippy.) The others want to see it work, so they decide to burn some. Nothing happens, and when James demands to know how long they have to wait, Lydia gives a vague answer that it might not be the right time or that maybe she just made the whole thing up. James believes the second explanation, but Laura is willing to give Lydia (and magic) more of a chance.
The two girls bond over their shared love of fantasy stories, and Laura invites Lydia to come to their house the next day. The boys admit to Laura that they kind of like Lydia, although she’d be easier to get along with if she didn’t have such a chip on her shoulder. Kip says that she’s always like that, and that’s why kids at school don’t get along with her either. Even so, Lydia is an interesting person.
When Kip gets home, he finds more of the strange plant that Lydia burned growing around his house, and his mother tells him that it’s an ordinary wildflower. Still, the next day, something happens which makes it seem like Lydia’s notion that it “makes unseen things appear and seen things disappear” has come true – the old lawnmower that came with the house is now missing, and there’s a young tree on the property that wasn’t there before. Coincidence? Maybe, but Lydia had also said that it could “transform people so they’re unrecognizable overnight”, and suddenly little Deborah has a new, weird haircut. When Deborah happily announces that she’s been transformed by magic, James realizes that it’s a trick and that Kip arranged everything. Lydia is angry that Kip was playing a joke, but he says that it isn’t really a joke, that he just wanted to keep the game going. Lydia says that it isn’t really a game to her, although she finally admits that she left the kittens.
Laura turns on the boys and says that it’s obvious that Lydia only did those things because she wanted to make friends. Lydia tries to deny it at first, but then admits that it’s true, but that she is never able to make friends and that she doesn’t know how. Laura says that she is Lydia’s friend, and the boys are, too. James agrees, saying that he just likes “to get the facts straight,” but now that the facts are known, he hopes that they can all start over again. The children each apologize to one another for the awkwardness, and Laura says that she is a little disappointed that there isn’t any real magic.
This part could be a story all by itself, but, not so fast! Just as the children are making amends with each other, a strange woman comes up to them in a horse-drawn carriage, looking like a visitor from another world in strange, old-fashioned clothing. They ask her if she came because they wished for her, and she says it’s difficult to say, but wonders why they would think so. The children say that they were playing a game and wished for a visitor from another world. The woman says that, in a way, she is from another world. She says that when she lived in this same valley, when she was young, life was very different, so it’s like she has come from the past to the present. The woman, Isabella King, lives in a house by the old silver mine. She invites the children to come and visit her sometime to have some of her silver cake and see the old mine. After she leaves, the children debate whether Isabella was brought to them by magic, but James says that it doesn’t matter because it looks like they’re going to have an adventure, magical or not.
Isabella King really does like to live in the past, maintaining her house and the old, disused silver mine that her father left her in the way that she’s sure he would want them to be maintained. However, her house and mine are threatened when the bank announces that it will foreclose on the mortgage. The children badly want to help Miss King, so they decide to go see the banker, Hiram Bundy, about it and try to persuade him to give her some leniency. Before they go to see him, Laura decides to make another wish on the wishing well because, in spite of Lydia’s earlier confession, she thinks that the well still might be magic.
Hiram Bundy agrees to talk to the children partly because he enjoys Lydia’s grandmother’s paintings, but he tells them that money isn’t the only concern about Miss King. Her family has a reputation for getting “peculiar” as they get older, and people have voiced concerns to him that Miss King is no longer capable of handling her own affairs and that she might be better off living in a nursing home. The children angrily deny that Miss King is mentally incompetent, giving him some of the cake that Miss King had baked for them as proof that she is still capable of doing things. Miss King is an excellent baker, and Mr. Bundy admits that he is impressed. Lydia also finally speaks up about the way the people in town, including Mr. Bundy himself, look at her and other people who are eccentrics. Lydia’s grandmother is allowed to be eccentric because she’s a talented artist and people make allowances for her, but those same people look at Lydia as if she’s terrible just because she likes to spend time by herself, riding her horse around. Adults in town are always saying that she’s a disgrace and that “somebody ought to do something” about her just because she doesn’t like things that other people like and wants to live her own life, doing her own thing. It’s not that there’s really anything wrong with either Lydia or Miss King so much as some of the people in town simply don’t like them and the way they do things. Because they aren’t the town’s little darlings, they are unfairly characterized as being worse than they really are and ostracized. Mr. Bundy admits the hypocrisy, which he is also guilty of, and assures her that he will take responsibility and straighten things out with Miss King.
When the children later see Mr. Bundy having cake and talking with Miss King at her house, Laura remembers that part of her wish at the well had been that Miss King would have Mr. Bundy eating out of her hand, and once again, the wish seems to have come true, literally. Although it still isn’t positive proof that Mr. Bundy’s change of heart was due to the well’s magic, the children think it might have been. They start considering that perhaps the well came through for them because they were doing a good deed, and perhaps they ought to try to do the same for others, thrilling in the apparent power they have to change people’s lives.
Testing out their theory proves difficult at first because they have trouble finding another person with a problem for them to solve. At first, the only person who seems to want their help is the woman downtown who asks them to help with setting up for a local art show to encourage amateur artists. The art show is open to anyone in town, and the kids think that maybe they should enter it, too. However, the only art supplies that they can afford are paper and crayons, and only Lydia manages to draw something that’s any good. Lydia doesn’t particularly like her drawing, saying it’s just a doodle, but Laura stops her from throwing it away. Then, the clerk at the store asks them if the small boy in the store is their little brother. It appears that the little boy is lost, so they decide that their good deed for the day will be helping him to get home.
They do find the boy’s home, and he turns out to be the child of a wealthy family who wandered off while his nurse was talking to a friend in town and ignoring him. The nurse at first blames the children for kidnapping the boy when they come to return him. The boy’s father doesn’t believe that, but he does reprimand the children for taking all day to return him because they had wanted to find his house themselves with the help of the wishing well instead of the police and allowed themselves to be sidetracked with something else they had also wanted to do. In the end, the children question how much they really helped the “lost heir”, as they think of him, because he might have been found sooner without their interference. However, one good thing does come out of their adventures: Lydia wins a prize in the art contest because Laura entered her picture on her behalf.
Lydia (as Laura had expected) is at first angry that Laura entered her in the contest without her permission, but Laura explains to her that she’s realized something about Lydia: Lydia prefers to think that no one cares about her or will ever appreciate her because she fears their rejection too much to risk trying to do anything that might earn their approval. Laura points out that their interest in her art proves that people really do appreciate her. Lydia’s grandmother even apologizes for not realizing before that Lydia has artistic talent. Lydia is amazed because she never really thought of her doodles as being anything special before. Kids at school had always made fun of her “crazy pictures,” and her teacher had always insisted that she “paint from nature” instead of drawing what she really wanted to draw.
But, the children aren’t done with the wishing well yet. Mrs. Witherspoon, the head of the local garden club and self-appointed arbiter of all that’s right and what everyone should think and do, has set herself against the new school that is planned for the area. She doesn’t like the idea of more traffic, more kids running around, and the possible risk to property values. However, many families with children live in the area, and they really want the school for their kids. Mrs. Witherspoon has set herself against them because she’s accustomed to people simply agreeing with what she wants (often just out of habit). She’s one of the big voices that enforces conformity in their town. She’s so awful that the kids consider making a voodoo doll of her, but then, it occurs to them that she might be much worse if she were actually in pain instead of just busy being one. They decide maybe she really needs people to be extra nice to her in order to make her more agreeable, but she refuses to accept any of their gestures of kindness because she thinks that they just want money from her, and she calls them juvenile delinquents. Can the power of the wishing well do anything to change her mind? Or, do they really need it?
A surprising friendship with Mrs. Witherspoon’s son, Gordy, leads the children on one last adventure that may (or may not) involve a ghost from the past and answer the question of whether or not the wishing well is really magic (unless there’s another explanation).
All through the book, there are other explanations besides magic for everything that happens. In fact, the wishing well may not do anything aside from acting as a source of inspiration for the children. Mr. Bundy might have been influenced by the children’s arguments even without the well, but the well is what influenced them to become friends with Isabella King and try to help her in the first place. Similarly, Lydia was always talented in art; it was just that no one recognized it until Laura was inspired to enter her drawing in the art show. The strangest episode takes place at the end of the book, when the children supposedly meet the ghost of the woman who may have made the well magic in the first place, but even then, the children realize that the “ghost” may have been the work of someone else, perhaps part of a conspiracy on the part of the people they’ve been helping all summer. However, it’s never established one way or the other, so it’s up to the readers’ imaginations to decide.
Much of the story is about fitting in and finding friends. In the beginning, Lydia was the main outcast in the community, but it turns out that many others, including Gordy, in spite of his mother’s social status, don’t quite fit in, either. In fact, it seems that perhaps more people in town would have liked Lydia more and encouraged her in her art if she had ever felt confident enough before to let people really get to know her. However, here I have to say that it was really the townspeople’s fault for driving her away in the first place. For a long time, Lydia had lost confidence in other people and in her ability to make friends because of the way people treated her. That was why Lydia sometimes purposely acted strange and didn’t try to get people to like her; she was already pretty firmly convinced that they didn’t and never would. It was just the message that everyone seemed to be sending her, and it kind of turned into a vicious cycle that was pushing Lydia further and further away from other people. Lydia really needed intervention from a third party to end the cycle. When Laura accepts Lydia and convinces the others to accept her as well, it opens up new sides of Lydia’s character and new possibilities for her.
The drive that some people have to assert control over others, enforce conformity within a group, and maintain an “us vs. them” mentality with non-conformists is responsible for many social problems and behavioral issues. Mrs. Witherspoon is an example of this, although it turns out that even our heroes are somewhat guilty in the way that they view Mrs. Witherspoon’s son Gordy at first.
This book taught me a new vocabulary word, purse-proud, which is used to describe Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends. Basically, it means pride in having money, especially if the person lacks other sources of pride. Mrs. Witherspoon and her friends are all wealthier members of the community, which is why they feel that they’re entitled to dictate to others what they should do and how things should be. They think that because they have more, they know best. (I’ve seen this before, but now I have a new word to describe it.) Initially, Mrs. Witherspoon is unconcerned with how local children are educated because she’s wealthy enough to send her son to private schools. Other people’s needs are of no concern and possibly a source of inconvenience for her. Gordy is the one who changes her mind when he realizes that he has a chance at making real friends with the neighborhood kids if he goes to public school, like they do, and convinces his mother that it’s what he really wants. Although his family is pretty privileged, Gordy never really made any friends at the private schools that he has attended and has actually been rather lonely. In a way, Gordy receives the final wish of the wishing well (for this book, anyway) in getting the new friends that he has needed and learning that there are other, more imaginative ways to have fun than what he’s been doing.
Gordy is a nice surprise as a character. At first, he seems to be a kind of clueless trouble-maker, but his friendship with the other kids brings out better qualities in him. Perhaps a better way to put it is that the others’ acceptance of him encourages him to show more of what he’s truly capable of. When James and Laura are introduced to Gordy, he doesn’t seem very bright, and he does things he shouldn’t, like swimming in the reservoir instead of the river and throwing rocks at windows to break them just because he can. In some ways, the other kids are right, that Gordy is thoughtless and doesn’t behave well. However, when they end up agreeing to hang out with Gordy one afternoon after failing to win over Mrs. Witherspoon with kindness, they realize that part of the reason that Gordy acts the way he does is that no one ever suggests to him that he do anything different. Gordy lacks somewhat for positive influences in his life. His mother thinks that she knows best in everything but isn’t always aware of what her son thinks and feels. Other people try to avoid talking to Gordy because they see him as an annoyance or source of trouble, so no one explains to him how his behavior is keeping him from making friends. However, Gordy does have good points. Unlike Lydia, Gordy doesn’t seem to hold any grudges in spite of experiencing similar problems with fitting in and making friends. Even when the other kids are less than enthusiastic about hanging out with him at first, he still keeps trying to be friendly and is quick to forgive their earlier coldness. Gordy knows that he really wants friends and that part of the key to getting them is to remain open to the possibility of being friends, even when those friends aren’t perfect. In the end, he is really good at showing the acceptance of others that is part of the theme of this story. Acceptance of others and willingness to be friendly improves things for everyone.
Another thing that I really liked about this book is the children’s attitudes toward people’s conventional views of art and literature. Many people are eager to tell others what art or writing should be and how it should be done. Lydia said that people had criticized her drawings before for being “crazy” or not from real life. They couldn’t see the imagination and talent that it took to make them because they weren’t what people expected. Even Lydia’s grandmother complains about always having to paint scenes with maple trees in them because that’s what grows where they live. She’d rather paint something else, but people expect maples trees, so that’s what she paints. Kip says that he kind of understands because his teachers always tell him to “write what he knows”, but really, he thinks that the things he doesn’t know well are much more interesting. They all want the freedom to explore new ideas, and that type of exploration is what makes fantasy stories so interesting. There may be magic, and maybe not, but considering the possibilities is half the fun!
The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.
Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton, 1943, 1947.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 