Half Magic and Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager
I’m striving towards the goal of being well-read, and considering how frequently a literary reference goes right over my head, I have a long way to go. I’ve been trying to pay special attention to the Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners when I pick a new book, feeling righteous every time I do.
But you can only struggle through a Bellow novel for so long without feeling like a dunderhead.
It’s at those times when I reach for some Children’s Literature. Partly because it’s comforting to read something where I’m pretty much guaranteed to know what all the words mean, and partly because there are some gaps in my reading there that I’m trying to fill too. Oh what I would give for a kindly librarian to have turned me in the right direction. To have some sweet old lady pull the Danielle Steele novel from my chubby hands and give me something worthwhile to read. Cest la vie.
At any rate, I’m trying to make up for lost time now. I own the entire Dahl oeuvre, and of course everything by J.K. Rowling, and a few other favorites I picked up from school, but I’m always looking for who else I missed. I *completely* missed Edward Eager. When I worked at Borders these were the books we were told to recommend to parents coming to find something else to shove under their kids nose before the spell of Harry Potter wore off. And though they were written for a decidedly less jaded and media savvy generation, they always did the trick.
It’s refreshing to see kids being kids again. Harry Potter I could read as an adult and relate to as an adult, and I suspect that’s what kids like about it too. Who didn’t want to be older than they were as children? That’s why the half years are so important to reflect your correct age. I remember a neighbor girl bragging that a ten-year-old was coming to live with her. In fact, that single trait was so impressive that that’s how we referred to her exclusively – The Ten Year Old. I think kids see these life and death conflicts in Harry Potter and fantasize about their adult lives – or maybe the even better alternative, their teenage lives – not their current ones.
But Edward Eager celebrates childhood. A time of fantasy, and yet not being sure when fantasy no longer becomes acceptable. The children in his books seem more pertinent to today’s generation than any other because they are so obviously torn between the two worlds. They want to believe in magic, and yet they feel pressure to be responsible and well-behaved and Mature. Yet ultimately, the childhood impulse wins out and they have all kinds of magical adventures.
In Half Magic, a group of siblings finds a magic coin that grants wishes, but only by half. After only a few misadventures, they find the loophole and start wishing for things like, “I wish I was twice as far as home again.” In Knight’s Castle, another group of children end up in the world of their dolls every time they go to sleep. And they are forced to repent for any abuses they’ve inflicted. Every magic scenario Eager invents is just charming, and something that would be guaranteed to tickle the funny bone of a kid.
Hi, Tresa!!!! *waiving wildly*