Find Five Children And It Executed By E. Nesbit Available As Volume
only written a couple of years earlier this was quite a different world to sitelinkThe Railway Children, It is a very simple kind of children's story, The parents are got rid of not by sending the children away to school, nor by having them eaten by an escaped hippo from the zoo, but by the rather quaint expedient of having them go away on business.
Living in the Kent countryside between a chalk quarry and a gravel pit the gaggle of five children dig up a magical creature the 'It' of the title which grants them one wish per day that lasts until sunset.
Each chapter then recounts the adventures that each day's one wish causes them, All the wishes and the adventures that follow bear out the maxim “be careful what you wish for”, Structurally it is as simple as could be, unlike the later book there are no flashes of the mother becoming a writer, being on the breadline, or political deviancy in Russia.
All the same it had me laughing in the mornings while waiting for my train, not laughing as in the blurbs on the back of comic novels that say things like 'uproariously funny' even though at most you suffer from one involuntary upward twist of the lips, but instead actually laughing were the face crinkles and you flash your teeth in a friendly manner.
Most of this was probably because of the naivety of the children, who get taught to be sour and suspicious, particularly because of their inability to express their wishes in an optimal manner, so that they get exactly what they asked for instead of what they wanted.
In a sequel they ought to all grow up to become contract lawyers,
There are interesting flashes of empire one of the boys hopes to grow up to plunder Africa so he can give piles of jewels to his mum .
But these are children expressing a child's perspective on the world, adults don't make any comment on empire, instead they are frightened of burglary and forged coins,
Some of the wishes come out of the children's reading and this gives a tortuous twist to the question of the child's perspective, because when they wish that their home is a castle besieged by hostile knights, or that they have bloodcurdling adventures with red Indians what they get is a magical reconstruction of their memories of their reading so the 'medieval' knights speak in the bizarre kind of English used in late Victorian children's books and wear so odd a mixture of arms and armour as to make a Hollywood film look almost like a textbook example of historical accuracy.
The Indians come off even worse, apparently the poor children had been reading the Leatherstocking Tales .
Perhaps not so much a case of being careful what you wish for but of the need to be careful of what you read,
Unfortunately the claim is made in the book that firewood cannot be found in the whole of Kent, This is a lie, there are loads of old pallets to be had lying around, and if you know where to look, old kitchen units too,
In a wider perspective the book is interesting in that the children are responsible, First for causing problems through their unwise, or incautious wishes, Secondly for resolving those problems through the application of brainpower and persuasion, The adults are unaware of the problems that the children confront, and would in any case be incapable of solving them as the children can in this there is a strong thematic link to sitelinkThe Railway Children, there the mother may earn the money but it is the children and their actions that eventually lead to the resolution of a resolutely nonmagical crisis.
This novel was written in, The author Edith Nesbit tells the story of five children obviously who come across a psammead, a sand fairy, while playing in a deserted gravel pit, This is one of the earliest examples of children left on their own who then have great adventures, Tha family goes to a house in the country on holiday when their father is called back to work and their mother leaves them to take care of her own sick mother.
The children are basically on their own, minimally supervised by the help,
I loved the story, The children have uncovered a fairy who must now grant their wishes, He agrees to grant one wish a day, and informs them that the results last only 'til sunset, Of course, the children choose foolishly and then spend the rest of the day trying to survive the resulting situation, It's fun to imagine what one might wish for in their situation,
As I mentioned, the book was written on, I was surprised to read the following: You know, grown up people often say they do not like to punish you, and that they only do it for your own good, and that it hurts them as much as it hurts you.
I thought for sure my parents' generation thought that
up ! Nesbit's writing is clever, I enjoyed the names. They call the baby "the lamb" because when he was learning to talk all he said was baaaa, The boy Cyril is called Squirrel by his sibs and Anthea is known as Panther, The five children are loosely based on her own children combined with children her husband had with his two mistresses! One of the mistresses lived with them, The other, along with her child, lived with Nesbit's mother, Nesbit was known for her lack of conformity to the day's mores and could be seen as eccentric,
Robert, one of the children, tells his siblings, "Oh, I'll be a soldier when I grow up you just see if I don't, I won't go into the Civil Service, whatever anyone says, " For some reason, I just love that ! What a lovely and fun book!
I read this story aloud with my family while on vacation, which really was perfect.
It wasn't what I expected at all, which was a more whimsical British fairytale with a moral lesson, but what I got was far superior, The story was very clever and would be fun for both children and adults to read, especially together, I can imagine better readers than myself putting on voices for each of the characters, which would heighten the fun even further, I may even look around for this book on audio to hear for myself,
I loved the omnipresent narrator, with the odd comments peppered throughout the story which always made me laugh, The SandFairy itself was not the friendly Totoro I pictured, but instead a grumpy ol' curmudgeon and the children were very like children, not the fictional young heroes seen as in other YA lit.
I did not end up writing "So true" in the margins anywhere, but did almost stain the pages with the tears of my laughter a few times.
The book was almost difficult to read aloud it was so funny at times,
If there's more I'm onto it! تذكرت أيام الطفولة عندما قرأت هذا الكتاب لأنها تشبة الرسوم المتحركة سميد
"هيا انظروا سميد مغامر فريد من ألف ألف عام يعود من جديد"
I read Five Children and It with the Womens Classic Literature Enthusiasts group and enjoyed it immensely.
If you like sitelinkMrs. PiggleWiggle and its series' mates by sitelinkBetty MacDonald, you will like Five Children and It, The ideal child reader of this book is between second and fifth grade, with a fondness for historical fiction or British classics, For comparison, this is substantially easier reading then sitelinkC, S. Lewis fiction. The ideal adult reader is anyone who enjoys classic childrens novels and/or Edwardian literature,
Five Children and It was published inand is the first novel in Nesbits Psammead trilogy, which consists of Five Children and It, sitelinkThe Phoenix and the Carpet, and sitelinkThe Story of the Amulet.
In Five Children and It, a group of siblings Anthea, Robert, Cyril, Jane, and a baby who is referred to as the Lamb find the Psammead in a sand quarry near their home in the English countryside.
The Psammead is a sand fairy able to grant wishes, This classic takes us to Edwardian England, where horses and buggies were the most common form of transportation, and servants looked after the children,
If you are spoileraverse, you may want to stop reading further,
The most successful aspects of Five Children and It were the worldbuilding, the authentic relationships between and amongst the children, and Nesbit's writing style, I could relate to the children and their emotions, They were described and interacted in a way that fit their ages and I found them to be differentiated in ageappropriate manners, Nesbits writing style struck just the right tone for me, between communicating a moral and having fun, The morals werent overblown or eyerolling, The vocabulary didn't strike me as dumbeddown for children, but it also was not as flowery and ornate as Frances Hodgson Burnett's contemporaneously written works and was a style I found highly appealing.
Forof the book, the adventures worked for me, and my prethgrade self would have adored this book because it doesn't talk down to children and is sufficiently complex to appeal to adults.
The sexist and racist elements one chapter involves gypsies grated on me but were tolerable, if Nesbits handling is appropriately appreciated as progressive in the context of herpeers, until I encountered "Scalps" it describes an adventure populated by “red Indians” which made me want to take a shower.
YMMV. The last story involving the mother and stolen or magically relocated jewelry was unsuccessful for me, and I am not certain why although I suspect that the mother's involvement in the story makes it less of an adventure and more of a problem to be solved less charming and imaginative and more dire.
As with the Mrs, Piggle Wiggle series, the chapters of Five Children and It read like a series of onlylightlyconnected short stories, some of which were more successful than others, It was great fun, though, a superquick readhours perhaps and I recommend it to anyone who reads the description and is intrigued, or who is a fan of Edwardian classics.
Background on the author: E, Nesbit was born in Kennington, Surrey in, The death of her father when she was four years old and the continuing ill health of her sister meant that Nesbit had a childhood absent focused adult attention, and frequent moves.
Her family moved across Europe in search of healthy climates for her sister, only to return to England for financial reasons, Growing up, she lived in France, Spain and Germany in addition to various locations in Great Britain, Her education came from a combination of periods in local elementary/grammar schools and the occasional boarding school but predominately through reading, Nesbit wanted to be known as a poet and in her teens had a poem published, This gave her greater confidence to write more, both for adults and children, but it is for herchildren's books including those on which she collaborated with other authors she is best known.
She distinguished herself from other writers of her time by writing about children as they were, and rewriting conventional adventure stories to present them with female characters in lead roles.
Her friends included HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, She also was a political activist and a follower of sitelinkWilliam Morris and she and her husband Hubert Bland were among the founders of the Fabian Society, a socialist organization later affiliated to the Labour Party.
Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during thes,
Interesting links and articles which may, necessarily, include spoilers:
sitelink foliosociety. com/author/ed biography
sitelink wordpress. co
sitelink jhu. edu/article/.