Half Magic. By Edward Eager.
Illustrations by N.M. Bodecker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.
Everland. By Wendy Spinale.
Scholastic. $17.99.
A book that deserves to be
called timeless even though it is not much more than half a century old, Edward
Eager’s Half Magic is as winning
today as it surely was when first published in 1954. It is a story of everyday
life, of warmth and what are now called “family values,” and of the touches of
real magic that cement a family even when some of its members can command the
sorts of powers that we usually talk of when using the word “magic.” Eager’s
suburban setting is a trifle quaint now, given the absence of computers and
cell phones, but aside from that, Half
Magic wears extremely well. The main reason is the charm of the underlying
premise: taking a page from the marvelous books of E. Nesbit, whom he greatly
admired, Eager (1911-1964) creates a story in which ordinary people living
ordinary lives suddenly encounter something very much outside the ordinary. And
they do not use it to gain great wealth or power but to try to fulfill everyday
wishes, the sort that kids in 1954 – and kids today – have all the time. Or
rather, in this case, the characters use the magic to try to fulfill half wishes: Eager came up with a
wonderfully clever premise in which a magical object that looks a lot like an
ordinary nickel is able to grant half
of what its holders wish for. The four children – Jane, Mark, Katherine and
Martha – have more depth and personality than kids in children’s books usually
do nowadays, and while they certainly share some feelings (mostly involving the
fact that their father has died and they are worried about their mother’s
happiness), they are individuated enough to make very different sorts of
wishes. Or, again, half wishes: the way the kids figure out the half-wish
premise (especially their misadventure with their sort-of-talking cat) and then
try to make wishes that will get them all
they want by wishing for twice what
they want is one of the many enjoyments of the book. The wishes themselves
range from the exotic (a trip to Camelot and confrontation with Merlin, who
proclaims the object’s magic older than his own and who proves quite quick on
the uptake about using it to make successful half wishes) to the mundane
(Jane’s wish to be in some other family, and her realization that that is not
what she wants after all). The characters stay true to themselves throughout
the book, and the eventual happy ending, in which they all realize that they
already have what they wish for most – each other – is certainly sentimental
but is not as oozingly treacly or forced-feeling as are many conclusions of books
for young readers today. Half Magic
has a pleasantly meandering, unforced narrative feel to it that is as engaging
in the 21st century as it was in the middle of the 20th.
There is a Katherine in
Wendy Spinale’s Everland, too –
spelled Katherina – but that is about all this book has in common with Eager’s.
The real-world setting here is an alternative-world one: for readers who would
prefer to strip away every last vestige of charm from a magical tale and see it
as dark, dour, and thoroughly downbeat, Everland
is as unpleasant a reimagining of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as anyone has come up with in recent years. A
straightforwardly dystopic novel in which London has been destroyed by bombs
and disease and only children have survived, Everland is all about 16-year-old Gwen Darling; her younger
siblings, Joanna and Mikey; a German army contingent led by Captain Hanz Otto
Oswald Kretschmer (hence the acronym “Hook,” of course); the evil Marauders and
their good-guy enemies, the Lost Boys; an underground city where a boy named
Peter lives and spends time outfoxing the baddies; and, yes, a “second star to
the right,” which is about all that this utterly charmless and frequently ugly
(++) book retains of Barrie’s sense of wonder and exploration. To be sure,
Barrie’s work is itself considerably darker and more adult than the many later adaptations
of it, from the famous musical starring Mary Martin to the 1953 Disney film and
the live-action movie made 50 years later. But if there is pervasive regret in
Barrie about the necessity of growing up, and wistfulness for both the real and
imagined joys and adventures (and frights) of childhood, Peter Pan has so many compensatory charms that it has rightly been
a classic since first staged in 1904. Pretty much anything potentially classic
has been stripped from Everland,
which mixes steampunk sensibilities (lots of zeppelins) with bits of scientific
absurdity (a deadly virus and, for a possible cure, a mixture of stem cells
with elements that make possible autotomy – tail regrowth – in some lizards).
The dim name echoes of Peter Pan, not
only “Hook” but also “Smeeth,” are the primary connections that Spinale
establishes with Barrie’s story, but it is quite certain that Everland is not intended for readers who
have any familiarity with (much less love for) Peter Pan in any of its guises. Barrie is merely a jumping-off
point for Spinale; and that would be fine if Everland had any significant originality in plotting, pacing or
characterization. But it has none of these – it is just another good-vs.-evil
dystopia – and it emphatically eschews humor, which might have made the whole
tale more palatable. Having Gwen and Hook narrate alternating chapters would
have been a good plan if doing so had created some balance and even ambiguity,
showing Gwen to have some level of darkness within and Hook to have some sort
of justifiable (even if twisted) motivation. But Spinale is either uninterested
in nuance or unsure how to proffer it (Everland
is her first novel). By the end of the book, when the good guys win and the bad
guys lose, when Gwen realizes she is growing up and there is a hint that even
Peter, too, may be doing so at last, readers have been subjected to a whole
series of cinematic action scenes and surface-level dialogue, all without any
significant portion of plot creativity; and, in fact, it is almost as hard to
care about the fate of the “good guys” here as it is figure out why the “bad
guys” do what they do (well, they are bad; that pretty well takes care of
things). It is fire (why is it so often fire?) that eventually cleanses things
here, but anything else that swept away the tatters of this disappointing story
would have been equally welcome.
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