I'm surprised at how much I didn't like it. Phillip is a boy with a huge crush on his older sister. When she gets married, he sulks and rebuffs the friendship of Lu, and earns the ire of the head nurse. One day out of pure grey boredom he is allowed to use Lu's toys and makes a fantastic city. But the city becomes real, and Lu is trapped in it.It sounds a lot better than it really is. It's horrifically cute, with so much nonsense and treacly Britishness that you risk diabetes reading it. There are Trials, and Adventures, and Oddly Endearing Fantastic Animals, but no one of course ever gets hurt, killing any sense of drama. And eventually you find you dislike all the characters, from the "eccentric" Mr. Noah, to the annoying dachsunds, to the parrot Nesbit can't decide whether or not she wants it to be heroic or a slacker, and to whatever utterly random thing that pops up next. The randomness doesn't seem to really work, either. One of Phillip's trials is to help the Dwellers by the Sea overcome their fear. It sounds cool, but it's just endless playing, and then summoning carpenter Perrin to make a boat. Of course, he magically appears when called, but, no, a carpenter can't make a boat. Only Noah can, because, well, he's Noah. And by now you've gotten so tired of his oddball ways you wish the Pretenderette might eat him or something. If I were a boy, this book would be so fey and cutesy I'd throw it down in disgust and make my own city, and make real heroic adventures in it. Another example. They need to overcome two lions. But no, they can't actually FIGHT them, that would be too un-British! They need to wait till they sleep, tie them up, have the annoying dogs lick the paint off their legs for hours, and then break their legs killing them. Because you know, when you lick the paint off their legs, it doesn't hurt them and they don't mind dying so much. "I don't mind killing things, but I do hate hurting them." Lu even says. And they encourage the dogs on by reciting poetry, cajoling them, "patting and praising" them, etc. The entire book is like this.So I found myself disliking it intensely. Nesbit's books mix the enchanting with the surreal, but they only work when it's equal measures. This is all surreal, all the time. It's also unintentionally hilarious due to a few shifts in the meaning of a word over time. I wont go into detail, but it's a synonym for hunger, that no longer means what it did.I'd avoid this for her other, better books.
Edith Nesbit uses the most ordinary details of life to make you feel like you are present in the lives of the characters in her book. You are present at the table where the bacon fat has gone grey on the plate because Philip isn't hungry. He's feeling uneasy because an unknown man has befriended his sister and he senses that not everything is OK. The reader is seeing the world through Philip's eyes so you share that sense of uneasiness and it makes you want to turn the page to see if the concern is justified. Perhaps he will turn out to be a very nice man and Philip is just an overanxious boy - or perhaps something is wrong. With small details - "he dropped his tooth mug with water in it too and the mug was broken and the water went into his boots" - she successfully reminds us of that strange fact that when something big is going wrong in our lives, lots of little things seem to join in and go wrong, too. Nesbit is a clever writer but we seldom notice how successfully she invites us into her world.
What do You think about The Magic City (2000)?
Had I discovered this book as a child, I would have cried "Hazaah - she has read my mind!" E. Nesbit (Edith, actually) crafted a tale so full of a child's imagination and one that would kick start the imagination of any child who had yet to discover just what that word meant. For me, this was the story of childhood, and a telling of a "what if" that I used to wonder about.I don't know what was more interesting to me as an adult - reading the book or reading the Afterword and learning more about Ellen Nesbit, who signed her books E. Nesbit only to find, with delight, that people presumed she was a man. She had a difficult childhood and difficult first marriage, and perhaps they helped fuel her imagination.Thank you to Edward Eager, whose books for children I have recently read, for recommending E Nesbit in his writings.
—Laurie
E.Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle is one of my favorites for its wonderful mix of realistic Edwardian children embarking on amusing magical adventures. This one has many of the features that make Nesbit a delight: real-world children who behave like children and have some depth and character development, adults who are mostly absent, and of course magic. In this one, Philip's older sister who raised him gets married, and Philip must contend with a new household, a new stepsister, and a 'dreadful' (in the parlance of the times) nanny. While everyone is away, he builds a wonderful miniature city from books and vases and candlesticks and tins and toy bricks. When Philip and the unjustly-despised stepsister are magically transported to this city, the two must work together to find a way to defeat the city's magic and return to the real world. Along the way, they become friends. This would have been 5 stars if I'd read it when I was 10.
—Constance
The first real book I ever read on my own; "real" in the sense of having a couple of hundred pages, not very many pictures, a plot, and some character development. I remember being puzzled by the switches between the everyday world and the fantasy world, and not understanding what was going on until about a third of the way through. Then a clue came up which was too obvious to miss. He's in the magic city fighting the dragon... it's a clockwork dragon... he has a clockwork dragon in the everyday world... aha! The fantasy world is his toys, and he ends up in it each night when he goes to sleep! It was terribly satisfying to have figured it out. OK, it wasn't exactly a killer insight, but I was only six; if I'd been a member of GoodReads at the time, I would have posted immediately. Since the Internet hadn't been invented yet, I've had to wait 44 years before getting around to it. Well, better late than never.This reading thing was clearly a good idea. I decided I would check out some more books from the library, and see if they were equally interesting. Within a few months, I'd turned into an E. Nesbit completist. I still think she's pretty good.
—Manny
