You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
tbr_the_unconquered 's review for:
Five Children and It
by E. Nesbit
There is not a child or an adult who has at some time in their life not wished for something to happen. Now a wish might take shapes and forms from the most frivolous and superficial to things that are better left unsaid. If you are a religious person you send the wish up to the heavens to God and if you are not then you simply mutter ”I wish... Now imagine if there really was someone who could grant your wishes, what would you get done through this entity ? There were a lot of fanciful notions that I had in my mind at the beginning of this story which made amusing observations at just such a ‘what-if’ scenario but the quandaries that the group of children in this story find themselves in was enough to disillusion me.
The plot construction is along the lines of a standard fairy tale – five children in a rural English village come across an ancient creature called a Psammead or a sand fairy in an abandoned quarry. Now the Psammead is quite a curmudgeon to deal with but has the amazing ability to grant one’s wishes. So begins a series of adventures in which the children find themselves while their wishes get fulfilled. While on the surface the story resembles a straight fairy tale, I felt that it teaches more subtle things. Primary among them was that a world in which all of one’s wishes came true wouldn’t be all that fun to live in. To add on to this is the realization that the way the mechanisms of the world works are rather intricate and complex and there is always a balance struck between granting one’s wishes and the limitations of it. The children who are a little too young to be bothered with such fancy ideas do however learn all of this through simple life lessons. It is a delightful story filled with lively characters and Edith Nesbit is a charmer when it comes to writing.
My only contention with the tale was the rather abrupt ending and while the author does leave the gates open for a potential sequel, it felt like a let-down after all the wonderful times together.
For a brief while it was like reversing gears and cruising through childhood. A beautiful little book !
The plot construction is along the lines of a standard fairy tale – five children in a rural English village come across an ancient creature called a Psammead or a sand fairy in an abandoned quarry. Now the Psammead is quite a curmudgeon to deal with but has the amazing ability to grant one’s wishes. So begins a series of adventures in which the children find themselves while their wishes get fulfilled. While on the surface the story resembles a straight fairy tale, I felt that it teaches more subtle things. Primary among them was that a world in which all of one’s wishes came true wouldn’t be all that fun to live in. To add on to this is the realization that the way the mechanisms of the world works are rather intricate and complex and there is always a balance struck between granting one’s wishes and the limitations of it. The children who are a little too young to be bothered with such fancy ideas do however learn all of this through simple life lessons. It is a delightful story filled with lively characters and Edith Nesbit is a charmer when it comes to writing.
My only contention with the tale was the rather abrupt ending and while the author does leave the gates open for a potential sequel, it felt like a let-down after all the wonderful times together.
For a brief while it was like reversing gears and cruising through childhood. A beautiful little book !