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A review by alys
The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It by E. Nesbit, Sanford Schwartz, H.R. Millar
3.0
Oh, 1902, you gave us such lovely fantasies, and also such blatantly stereotypically racist depictions of non-English cultures.
The chapters with the gypsies and "red indians" whose only joy in life was to scalp everyone made me cringe.
Edward Eager said that E. Nesbit was a major influence on his writing, and I can absolutely see that reading this book. There is a similar straight-forwardness to the writing, the sense that a jolly, friendly narrator is telling you the story, and a shared sense of complacent acceptance for the strange things that happen. Although Edward Eager's characters - perhaps because they'd grown up on such stories themselves? - were much more clever in their dealings with magic. It was frustrating to me that the five children got into such scrapes with their wishes when really just asking the Psammead to not grant a wish unless a specific code word was used would have solved nearly all of their problems. Of course even their three most intentional wishes, the beauty, the money, and the wings, didn't go quite right, but the wing mishaps were sheer carelessness.
I was amused to note the number of times the children were put out because they missed their meals. Such a note of realism in a fantasy book, to be hungry and annoyed about it!
The chapters with the gypsies and "red indians" whose only joy in life was to scalp everyone made me cringe.
Edward Eager said that E. Nesbit was a major influence on his writing, and I can absolutely see that reading this book. There is a similar straight-forwardness to the writing, the sense that a jolly, friendly narrator is telling you the story, and a shared sense of complacent acceptance for the strange things that happen. Although Edward Eager's characters - perhaps because they'd grown up on such stories themselves? - were much more clever in their dealings with magic. It was frustrating to me that the five children got into such scrapes with their wishes when really just asking the Psammead to not grant a wish unless a specific code word was used would have solved nearly all of their problems. Of course even their three most intentional wishes, the beauty, the money, and the wings, didn't go quite right, but the wing mishaps were sheer carelessness.
I was amused to note the number of times the children were put out because they missed their meals. Such a note of realism in a fantasy book, to be hungry and annoyed about it!