Summertime belongs to childhood. The grown-up version, with BBQs and yard work, can’t compare to the long, long days spent exploring and digging in the dirt.Now, I’m a winter girl, through and through, but when the lightning bugs start to rise up out of the grass, I start to ache for the summers from when I was little. Unfortunately, all the kids who used to comeoutandplay have moved on, and I’ve been trying to eat less dirt, so I was at a loss for a way to revisit my summers.Then I remembered Edward Eager. Eager was a Harvard grad and a sophisticated, grown-up playwright. He never thought about writing children’s books until he had his own son. They quickly read through Eager’s favorites, E. Nesbit’s fairy stories and the Oz books, but then Eager couldn’t find anything else to read to his kid. So he decided to write the stories himself. Writer’s perogative.Half Magic is Eager’s first fairy tale. It’s about a group of four children, three girls and one boy, who recently lost their father. (Those unfortunate children who keep both their parents must resign themselves to utterly uninteresting lives.) Their mother can’t afford to take them to the country for vacation, and the kids are at a loss for a way to make their summer worthwhile. One day, while on their way to the library, the children find an old, worn nickel.After a few accidental mis-wishes and much discussion, the kids realize that it’s the coin they found that’s causing the magic–well, a little magic. Somehow, because of the age and wear of the coin, it will only grant half of each wish.The wishes, done by halves, bring the kind of adventures you only find in proper fairy tales. They have rules and consequences and the adventure is in learning how to manipulate the magic. Each child gets a day in charge of the wishing, and each day of wishes gets a few chapters to play out.Later on in the book, when the children understand the coin fully, the wishes get a bit boring–”I wish X times two” takes care of the guess work–but until then, there are several good mishaps. (My favorite is when they wish that the cat can talk. Have you ever met a cat who can half talk? That’s not a happy cat.)So, if you need a way to rekindle your vacation time, check out Edward Eager’s books. (Read the first chapter of HM here.) They’re fast, funny, charming reads. Most of them take place over the course of a few warm days, and they’ll all bring you back to the time when lightning bugs were only a fraction of your summer magic.Read if:You’re looking for the most appealing way possible to spend an afternoon with fractions.You can’t find anyone to play Ghost in the Graveyard with.You want a proper fairy tale.Disclaimer: I got this book and many others from my family’s close friend, Jeri. Every year for my birthday, Jeri would give me a big box of old books. (These would last me a couple of days, and then my reading habits would continue to be a financial burden for my parents, who raised me to buy books before food, and gladly kept me fed.) Jeri introduced me to lots of my favorites, and I’d be remiss not to mention her in a post about Edward Eager. If I didn’t give her credit, she’d threaten to tan my fanny.I reviewed this book on my blog here: http://short-version.com/2010/06/summ...
Anytime I visit a bookstore, I spend a good 15 minutes browsing the children's section. More often than not, I succumb to nostalgia (and a hot wallet) and buy a title I remember fondly. On reckless days, I wind up carrying away something like Baby-sitters on Board!: Super Special #1. (I can't say I'm particularly proud of those days, but sometimes a girl just needs a fix.) Then, other afternoons, I take my time and select a classic I've almost forgotten. I never have a great recollection of these books--I only know that they excited me and set my imagination whirring. They were the types of books that tempted me to ignore the rules and beg for "five more pages before lights out? Pretty please?" This is how I came home with Half Magic.I mean, what kid doesn't like magic? Long before Harry Potter conjured a merchandising empire, four unassuming young siblings stumbled upon a strange silver coin on the sidewalk near their house. The coin's origin remains a mystery, because only adults ask silly questions like, "Well, how did that get there?" The important thing is, the coin grants wishes--by halves. So, if you wish for a million dollars, you'll get 500 thou. If you wish for a tropical vacation, you'll land atop a plastic palm tree on a miniature golf course. (The children don't wish for these things, of course. They're far more reasonable.)The premise of Half Magic promises clever humor along with adventure, and author Edward Eager doesn't disappoint. When littlest sister Martha wishes that the family's cat could talk, the cat begins speaking a sort of feline Spanglish--purrs and meows mixed in with discernible words. The cat's name, by the way, is Carrie Chapman Cat, honoring "a famous lady" often mentioned in the newspaper. (Nowadays, the cat would probably be called Cora...you know, Cat Cora.) Like the Muppet movies, Half Magic sprinkles in a few inside jokes for grown-ups, but nothing condescending or contrived enough to detract from the story. If I had the children's mystic coin, I would wish for Mark, the lone male sibling, to be four times as interesting. Though Eager seems to have had progressive gender views--the children's mother is a single parent and newspaper journalist--poor Mark is still characterized mostly by his boyness. I was also a little disappointed in the depiction of a snooty, boring family up the street, who, upon my adult reading of the book, I now recognize as a rather mocking stereotype of liberals. (They're, gasp, vegetarians who study child psychology...not unlike, um, the writer of this review.) But Half Magic was still just as much fun as I expected it to be--or twice as much, if I'm holding the coin.
What do You think about Half Magic (1999)?
Originally posted here as part of the 30 Day Book Challenge.This one is easy. The Book That Made Me Fall In Love With Reading I don't even know what to say about this book. If you haven't read it, you should. If you have younger children, read it to them. Half Magic was written in the 50s about a family living in the 20s, so of course it's dated, but it's still as full of charm as ever. As an adult I catch little literary references that I missed when I was young, and that adds to my love of this book (more so than the others in the series).I was an only child until I was 10, so before that, reading about this family of brothers and sisters gave me a bit of a pang. I wanted siblings to have summertime adventures with. This was my favourite book to read during the summer (followed closely by Magic by the Lake, which follows the same siblings), curled up in some quiet nook at my grandparents' house. I found these books there one year and Nan told me I could have them. I don't know which of my dad's siblings they belonged to, but I think it was my aunt.I kind of never wanted to ask because it felt like they had appeared just for me. [shrug] I know, kids are silly.Confession:I still pick up coins and make double wishes on them, hoping that they'll come true.
—sj
Mostly, I love this book. I liked it as a kid (except for that caveat I'll get to in a minute). I like it now, as a grown-up. The story is interesting and engaging. The trouble the kids get themselves into is believable (well, for a fantasy novel...!), and I like their solutions. The problem of having to double all your wishes is interesting to me. The only thing is...The only thing is that a whole chapter is taken up with a trip to a desert, where the children run across an evil, wicked, terrible Arab man. Even the illustration is an ugly caricature. There isn't even a feasible way to avoid this part - it's interwoven in the story in such a way that you can't simply say "Look, this is a part that I feel is inappropriate, we're not reading it today" and skip to the next part.Now, I know, somebody is going to pop up and say "But you can't judge books from 60 years ago according to OUR standards today!" Fair enough. But I'm not reading this book to a child 50 years ago. I'm reading it (or not, actually - I haven't put it on my to-be-read list yet precisely because of this problem) to children NOW. Even when I was a kid, a mere 30 years after the book's publication, that part made me uncomfortable.Am I saying you're bad for liking this book? Absolutely not. I like this book! Am I saying you shouldn't read this book to your children, or allow them to read it? Not necessarily. I certainly support you if that is your choice, but that's not what I mean to say. All I'm saying is that you should read this book yourself before you read it with your children (or use it in a classroom, especially if you have Arab students!), and decide for yourself the best way to approach this issue. It may be to find a way to skip that passage, or it may be to not read the book just yet (or at all - there are plenty of good books out there, choosing one always requires NOT-choosing another!) or it may be to discuss this part with your children and explain your views on the subject, or it may be that you think it's not a big deal. (I disagree with the last, but that's your choice.)Other than that one thing, this is a very good book. It's just that that one thing is SO important. Please pre-read this book.
—Connie
I was excited to read Half Magic because I thought it was a pretty cool idea for a book-- that these children receive magical powers but the magic only half works. While the kids end up on some neat adventures and the book does have some funny moments, overall it didn't really live up to my hopes. Part of it was that I didn't think the way the half magic played out was all that cool -- like when Jane is so mad that she wishes there was a fire (weird to begin with...) and a fire comes, but only i
—Blake
