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Half Magic (Paperback)
by Edward Eager , N. M. Bodecker (Illustrator)
| Category:
Fiction, Ages 9-12, Children's books |
| Market price: ¥ 108.00
MSL price:
¥ 88.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A magic story about four children and a half magic coin which can grant wishes; it is never too cute. |
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Author: Edward Eager , N. M. Bodecker (Illustrator)
Publisher: Odyssey Classics
Pub. in: March, 1999
ISBN: 0152020683
Pages: 208
Measurements: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BC00299
Other information: 1st Harcourt Brace Young Classics Ed edition
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- MSL Picks -
Half Magic is a book of fantasy about real kids who play and argue and fight. They're good solid kids who know the difference between right and wrong. Edward Eager's style is matter-of-fact, succinct and hilarious. But there's something else at work in Half Magic, aside from a terrific plot about a magic coin that grants half of your wishes, in its own inimitable way. The children in Half Magic have no father, and one of the strands of the plot has to do with a "rather small gentleman" who befriends the children and may wind up becoming their stepfather. Jane, the oldest child, will have nothing of it, telling her siblings "Everything's just spoiled, that's all!". A few paragraphs later, Eager gently explains: "She felt awful inside, the way you always do when you've been perfectly hateful to those you love best, and she didn't even know why she had done it. She didn't know why the mere thought of Mr. Smith upset her so - or if she did know the reason, she didn't want to admit it, even to herself. But the thing was that Jane was the only one of the four children who really remembered their father." Simply, and truly, Eager captured the emotions of children who need to come to terms with loss.
Half Magic is never too cute, and with just enough emotion to complement the magic, this classic is sure to hold a special place in any child's library.
Target readers:
Kids aged 9-12
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Edward Eager was a playwright and lyricist who turned his hand to children's books. His seven books remain among the most popular children's fantasies ever written by an American.
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Faced with a dull summer in the city, Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha suddenly find themselves involved in a series of extraordinary adventures after Jane discovers an ordinary-looking coin that seems to grant wishes. The title refers to a coin that the children find. Through a comical series of coincidences, they discover that the coin is magic. But it's not totally magic-it's only half magic. That means there's certain logic to the wishes one must make to generate a desired outcome... Since Half Magic first hit bookshelves in 1954, Edward Eager's tales of magic have become beloved classics. Now four cherished stories by Edward Eager about vacationing cousins who stumble into magical doings and whimsical adventures are available in updated hardcover and paperback formats. The original lively illustrations by N. M. Bodecker have been retained, but eye-catching new cover art by Kate Greenaway Medalist Quentin Blake gives these classics a fresh, contemporary look for a whole new generation.
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1. How It Began
It began one day in summer about thirty years ago, and it happened to four children.
Jane was the oldest and Mark was the only boy, and between them they ran everything.
Katharine was the middle girl, of docile disposition and a comfort to her mother. She knew she was a comfort, and docile, because she'd heard her mother say so. And the others knew she was, too, by now, because ever since that day Katharine would keep boasting about what a comfort she was, and how docile, until Jane declared she would utter a piercing shriek and fall over dead if she heard another word about it. This will give you some idea of what Jane and Katharine were like.
Martha was the youngest, and very difficult.
The children never went to the country or a lake in the summer, the way their friends did, because their father was dead and their mother worked very hard on the other newspaper, the one almost nobody on the block took. A woman named Miss Bick came in every day to care for the children, but she couldn't seem to care for them very much, nor they for her. And she wouldn't take them to the country or a lake; she said it was too much to expect and the sound of waves affected her heart.
"Clear Lake isn't the ocean; you can hardly hear it," Jane told her.
"It would attract lightning," Miss Bick said, which Jane thought cowardly, besides being unfair arguing. If you're going to argue, and Jane usually was, you want people to line up all their objections at a time; then you can knock them all down at once. But Miss Bick was always sly.
Still, even without the country or a lake, the summer was a fine thing, particularly when you were at the beginning of it, looking ahead into it. There would be months of beautifully long, empty days, and each other to play with, and the books from the library.
In the summer you could take out ten books at a time, instead of three, and keep them a month, instead of two weeks. Of course you could take only four of the fiction books, which were the best, but Jane liked plays and they were nonfiction, and Katharine liked poetry and that was nonfiction, and Martha was still the age for picture books, and they didn't count as fiction but were often nearly as good.
Mark hadn't found out yet what kind of nonfiction he liked, but he was still trying. Each month he would carry home his ten books and read the four good fiction ones in the first four days, and then read one page each from the other six, and then give up. Next month he would take them back and try again. The nonfiction books he tried were mostly called things like "When I Was a Boy in Greece," or "Happy Days on the Prairie"-things that made them sound like stories, only they weren't. They made Mark furious.
"It's being made to learn things not on purpose. It's unfair," he said. "It's sly." Unfairness and slyness the four children hated above all.
The library was two miles away, and walking there with a lot of heavy, already-read books was dull, but coming home was splendid-walking slowly, stopping from time to time on different strange front steps, dipping into the different books. One day Katharine, the poetry lover, tried to read Evangeline out loud on the way home, and Martha sat right down on the sidewalk after seven blocks of it, and refused to go a step farther if she had to hear another word of it. That will tell you about Martha.
After that Jane and Mark made a rule that nobody could read bits out loud and bother the others. But this summer the rule was changed. This summer the children had found some books by a writer named E. Nesbit, surely the most wonderful books in the world. They read every one that the library had, right away, except a book called The Enchanted Castle, which had been out.
And now yesterday The Enchanted Castle had come in, and they took it out, and Jane, because she could read fastest and loudest, read it out loud all the way home, and when they got home she went on reading, and when their mother came home they hardly said a word to her, and when dinner was served they didn't notice a thing they ate. Bedtime came at the moment when the magic ring in the book changed from a ring of invisibility to a wishing ring. It was a terrible place to stop, but their mother had one of her strict moments; so stop they did.
And so naturally they all woke up even earlier than usual this morning, and Jane started right in reading out loud and didn't stop till she got to the end of the last page.
There was a contented silence when she closed the book, and then, after a little, it began to get discontented.
Martha broke it, saying what they were all thinking.
"Why don't things like that ever happen to us?"
"Magic never happens, not really," said Mark, who was old enough to be sure about this.
"How do you know?" asked Katharine, who was nearly as old as Mark, but not nearly so sure about anything.
"Only in fairy stories."
"It wasn't a fairy story. There weren't any dragons or witches or poor woodcutters, just real children like us!"
They were all talking at once now.
"They aren't like us. We're never in the country for the summer, and walk down strange roads and find castles!"
"We never go to the seashore and meet mermaids and sand-fairies!"
"Or go to our uncle's, and there's a magic garden!"
"If the Nesbit children do stay in the city it's London, and that's interesting, and then they find phoenixes and magic carpets! Nothing like that ever happens here!"
"There's Mrs. Hudson's house," Jane said. "That's a little like a castle."
"There's the Miss Kings' garden."
"We could pretend..."
It was Martha who said this, and the others turned on her.
"Beast!"
"Spoilsport!"
Because of course the only way pretending is any good is if you never say right out that that's what you're doing. Martha knew this perfectly well, but in her youth she sometimes forgot. So now Mark threw a pillow at her, and so did Jane and Katharine, and in the excitement that followed their mother woke up, and Miss Bick arrived and started giving orders, and "all was flotsam and jetsam," in the poetic words of Katharine.
Two hours later, with breakfast eaten, Mother gone to work and the dishes done, the four children escaped at last, and came out into the sun. It was fine weather, warm and blue-skied and full of possibilities, and the day began well, with a glint of something metal in a crack in the sidewalk.
"Dibs on the nickel," Jane said, and scooped it into her pocket with the rest of her allowance, still jingling there unspent. She would get round to thinking about spending it after the adventures of the morning.
The adventures of the morning began with promise. Mrs. Hudson's house looked quite like an Enchanted Castle, with its stone wall around and iron dog on the lawn. But when Mark crawled into the peony bed and Jane stood on his shoulders and held Martha up to the kitchen window, all Martha saw was Mrs. Hudson mixing something in a bowl.
"Eye of newt and toe of frog, probably," Katharine thought, but Martha said it looked more like simple one-egg cake.
And then when one of the black ants that live in all peony beds bit Mark, and he dropped Jane and Martha with a crash, nothing happened except Mrs. Hudson's coming out and chasing them with a broom the way she always did, and saying she'd tell their mother. This didn't worry them much, because their mother always said it was Mrs. Hudson's own fault, that people who had trouble with children brought it on themselves, but it was boring.
So then the children went farther down the street and looked at the Miss Kings' garden. Bees were humming pleasantly round the columbines, and there were Canterbury bells and purple foxgloves looking satisfactorily old-fashioned, and for a moment it seemed as though anything might happen.
But then Miss Mamie King came out and told them that a dear little fairy lived in the biggest purple foxglove, and this wasn't the kind of talk the children wanted to hear at all. They stayed only long enough to be polite, before trooping dispiritedly back to sit on their own front steps.
They sat there and couldn't think of anything exciting to do, and nothing went on happening, and it was then that Jane was so disgusted that she said right out loud she wished there'd be a fire!
The other three looked shocked at hearing such wickedness, and then they looked more shocked at what they heard next.
What they heard next was a fire siren!
Fire trucks started tearing past-the engine, puffing out smoke the way it used to do in those days, the Chief's car, the hook and ladder, the Chemicals!
Mark and Katharine and Martha looked at Jane, and Jane looked back at them with wild wonder in her eyes. Then they started running.
The fire was eight blocks away, and it took them a long time to get there, because Martha wasn't allowed to cross streets by herself, and couldn't run fast yet, like the others; so they had to keep waiting for her to catch up, at all the corners.
And when they finally reached the house where the trucks had stopped, it wasn't the house that was on fire. It was a playhouse in the backyard, the fanciest playhouse the children had ever seen, two stories high and with dormer windows.
You all know what watching a fire is like, the glory of the flames streaming out through the windows, and the wonderful moment when the roof falls in, or even better if there's a tower and it falls through the roof. This playhouse did have a tower, and it fell through the roof most beautifully, with a crash and a shower of sparks.
And the fact that it was a playhouse, and small like the children, made it seem even more like a special fire that was planned just for them. And the little girl the playhouse belonged to turned out to be an unmistakably spoiled and unpleasant type named Genevieve, with long golden curls that had probably never... |
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Lincoln Public Library (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Half Magic is an enchanting book by Edward Eager. This book is about four children: Jane the oldest, Mark who helps Jane rule over the two younger girls: Katharine who is obsessed with poetry and Martha a difficult child to handle. The four children find a magic charm which they discover grants half of every wish. The children take turns wishing on the charm which brings them on exciting adventures throughout the book. I would recommend this book to people who like magical excitement. I had a lot of fun reading this book and think you will too. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
I too read this book when I was 9 or 10 and then worked my way through the other 6 titles. I loved them all so very much that I read them again and again. Before I had reached my teens, they were like old and very dear friends. However, here in the UK, they've been out of print for quite some time and it looked as if my hope of owning my own set was never to be. As a librarian, I've frequently come across very old and battered copies of Half Magic in several Children's Libraries but about 10 years ago, I had the best piece of luck. I was working in a (nameless) library in Central London and came across a complete set in a store room as part of an out-of-print collection. I avidly fell upon them all and renewed old acquaintances with the children I'd thought of as my friends. When that collection was broken up for sale/pulping, I was given the 7 Edward Eager books for my own. Since then, I've read them to my own children. They are more than stories, they are part of me. Edward Eager had a huge gift; in a few words, he could paint a detailed picture with warmth, humor and clarity. His children are real and believable. The situations are zany and so funny and the magic that underpins everything is the same magic that lives in the readers' hearts and minds for ever. What a nice man he must have been. I wish I'd known him. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Edward Eager wrote seven books, each featuring a gang of rambunctious kids with lots of ideas, plenty of stuffy grown-ups and boring rules to dislike, and E. Nesbit books to check out from the library, and a tendency to find magic stuff. Of course there's always a twist, and here it's that wishes don't always work as well as the kids want them to. There's also a love story tied into it-their widowed mother finds an odd but likeable man-and the usual pile of time travel, jewelry, and finger pointing when things go wrong. The magic's main 'trick' may wear on a bit at the end, but all the different scenes feature fairly standard wishes that never turn out as expected and yet don't contain too much tortured explanation. Sometimes the situations have no visible magic, and there's even a humorous sort of ghost story. The best may be the passages where children look for magic or realize it's gone for the moment or close to gone for good. Some mythological figures get taken down a peg for good measure, and even if it's all a bit slapstick, it hasn't been copied too heinously yet. Except possibly by Eager. With each ensuing magic book his explanations get a bit more tortured, with the device to see historical or fictional characters becoming more complex. The characterizations become too exaggerated, and it's not as fun to believe. Maybe his own writing magic drained like the charm in the book-but like the charm near the end, it's still effective. The drop off in enjoyment is something that I didn't see in Nesbit's more overtly original literary guide, E. Nesbit. Later Eager books force you to know a good bit about some middling established children's literature-and his previous books. But it definitely didn't start that way with Half Magic and its simple new idea. The dialogue makes great jumps, blending Important Questions Kids Have with accepted conventions of fantasy, i.e. the kids getting mad at being called elfspawn. The fantasy scenes are also memorable with the villains giving great laughs, and it's a very quick read. And you'll enjoy the pictures too. |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Half Magic is a book for everyone who likes humor, action, and magic. It all starts on a hot, sunny day in the most boring summer the 4 siblings, Jane, Mark, Katherine, and Martha had ever had. When the oldest child of the family, Jane, finds a nickel on the ground. She soon finds out that it is a magic charm. She later finds out that its not complete magic, only Half Magic. So, if you wish twice the amount you get complete magic. One day the siblings wish themselves back in time in the days of king Arthur and help Sir Lancelot after being trapped by Morgan La Fay. Then they saw a tournament and then met the sorcerer, Merlin. Merlin tells the siblings that the charm has been worn out and does not have much magic left. They wish themselves back to the twentieth century and the next day, something happened. That day Jane got annoyed with Martha so she put her under her chair at the movies. Jane dropped her handbag with the charm inside and Martha got it. Martha wished to not be there so she was half there and she made a commotion. When the charm lost its power, the siblings put it on the sidewalk and someone picked it up. Who knows what will happen next. Half Magic is truly a great book for any person. |
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