Two years after the events in The Magic Bedknob, Carey and Charles and Paul return to the little village of Much Fresham for the summer, only to discover that Miss Price really has given up magic. Her workshop has been given over to her wholesome new hobby of canning fruits and vegetables. Even the bed… Read more Bonfires and Broomsticks (1945)
Two people look enough alike that one could pass for the other. Can they pass? What happens when people mistake you for someone else? What would you need to know in order to fit yourself into someone else’s life? Authors have played with this idea for centuries. There are the separated twins in Roman playwright… Read more Switching Places: The Kellyhorns (1942)
In a previous post I wrote about the Inventive Small-Town Animal-Loving Boy Whose Name Begins with H. The first of these books by nearly a decade was Homer Price (1942, by Robert McCloskey, better known for Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal). Homer Price is clearly the original for this genre — it… Read more Homer Price (1942)
Edward Eager wrote seven books about magical doings, all of them modeled after E. Nesbit whom he greatly admired. But where Nesbit is serious or understatedly funny, Eager is straight-up comical. He was a playwright, and it shows in his quick pacing and sharp characterization. Who can resist writing like this? “Katharine was the middle… Read more Knight’s Castle (1956)
The title of this book can mislead, making one think of sweet old-fashioned books about ordinary girls enjoying ordinary girl activities. But Ballet Shoes is cut from an altogether different cloth. It concerns three very different orphan girls in London, adopted by an absent-minded paleontologist who disappears and leaves the family in poverty. First their… Read more Ballet Shoes (1936)
Like Snyder’s The Egypt Game, The Changeling concerns two girls who form a friendship around a system of imaginings. Martha is from a socially prominent, emotionally unexpressive family; Ivy is from a large, poor, dysfuntional family prone to petty crime. Neither girl fits in her own world, so they spend their time in a shared… Read more The Changeling (1970)
In 1967, newcomer E. L. Konigsburg published two of the best books of the 1960’s (and, astonishingly, both got Newbery awards/honors in the same year). The better-known of the two is From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but here we will consider the equally excellent, and completely different, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth,… Read more Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth (1967)
A class of French fifth-graders during the German occupation have been evacuated to the countryside, where a nun runs a school in an old house. The story begins with a stunningly good bit of action: the children are playing make-believe, and this being a Catholic culture and just past Christmas, the flight of Jesus’s family… Read more Twenty and Ten (1952)
City-bred Elizabeth Ann (later styled “Besty”) lives with her nervous, overprotective aunts, until circumstances require her to go live with Vermont relatives. The relatives expect her to be capable and self-reliant, and little by little she proves them right. This could easily be mistaken for a knock-off of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) or Anne… Read more Understood Betsy (1916)
What a lovely, sun-drenched, quirky book this is. The Moomins and their extended family (including Sniff, Snufkin, two Snorks, a Hemulin, and a Muskrat) spend an enchanted spring and summer having adventures, complicated by a magician’s hat that changes things into other things. No description of those adventures could do them justice. I will just… Read more Finn Family Moomintroll (1948)