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Describe your latest book. The Marriage of Opposites is a novel about the mother of impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, set on the island of St. Thomas and in Paris. What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had? A secretary at a university sex clinic. What was your favorite book as a child? Magic [...]

I have come to believe that the books that influence us most are the ones we read at the impressionable ages of eight to twelve, the time when readers are most open to imagination and possibilities. It’s 
the time, too, when our worldview is being formed, not only by experience but also by our readings. Who you become as a reader deeply affects who you become as a person and, for some, as a writer. My first introduction to literary magic was through the work of Edward Eager, which I was lucky enough to find when my life was falling apart in the real world as my parents divorced. I stumbled upon Half Magic stored on a dusty shelf at the Malverne Public Library one summer day when I still had all the time in the world. Was I looking for a way out of the sorrow that surrounded me? Absolutely. But I was looking for more. I was looking for instructions on how to live one’s life, something that was especially unclear to me at the time. Back then, no one recommended books to a child-reader, at least not to me, and finding a book that spoke to you all on your own, turning those first few pages and entering into another world, was pure magic.

Eager, who was a lyricist and dramatist, is a dry, witty, adult sort of writer who fell into children’s books accidentally (isn’t that how all good magic stories begin?) when he discovered E. Nesbit’s work while searching for books to share with his son, Fritz. His droll, self-effacing essay “Daily Magic,” published in The Horn Book Magazine in October 1958, celebrated both E. Nesbit and Eager’s own delight in finding magic. He wrote for children through his own adult sensibility in the time 
of real-life Mad Men, cocktails and trains home to Connecticut, but he was an adult who remembered what children loved most. At the same time, he never spoke down to his readers, something I very much appreciated and had previously found only in fairy tales. Eager predicted the flowering of magical realism, suggesting that the core of a good magic book was the dailiness of its magic: “So that after you finish reading…you feel it could happen to you, any day now, round any corner.” It’s the very ordinariness of both setting and characters that makes the magic all the more believable. It’s a lesson learned from fairy tales, wherein an ordinary girl can sleep for a hundred years and a perfectly normal brother and sister discover a witch’s house in the woods and beat her at her own game. The best magic, after all, is always woven into the facts of our everyday lives.

Eager insisted that his own books could not have existed without E. Nesbit’s influence. He thought of himself as a more accessible and lesser author, and referred to himself as “second-rate E. Nesbit.” But for American readers his magical worlds may be more relatable than Nesbit’s magical books, which can seem old-fashioned and stuffy to modern children. Eager’s books maintain a timelessness that allows current child readers to be as enchanted as I was when I discovered his books in the sixties. Because Eager is a lover of puns and jokes, his books are both entertaining and adventurous. But behind the fun there is more: the sense that an adult is telling important facts about issues of family loyalty and love, and of course Eager always includes a lesson concerning the love of reading and books. Behind the adventure there is the wise reminder that, even while growing up, it’s still possible to see the world as a place of enchantment and to not lose what we had as children: the power of imagination.

Eager’s theory of magic is that it can and will thwart you whenever possible. For children, well aware that the adult world often thwarts childhood itself, the contrary rules of magic come as no surprise. At last, someone is telling the truth: the world around us often doesn’t make sense, and we have to do our best to figure it out. Magic is playful and unreliable, and that’s half the fun of it, especially when it’s doled out in halves or discovered in a lake on a summer vacation. The participants have to figure out the rules as they go along, as they would a puzzle or a game with rules that may shift and change. They make mistakes — some amusing, some dangerous — and in many instances they have to tame the magic and take control of it lest it take control of them. Is this not the deepest fear and wish of every child? That he or she will manage to take charge of a world that is chaotic and unfathomable? As every child reader knows, especially those with unhappy childhoods, the first exit out of the dreariness and difficulties of one’s real life is through reading. All books make for a good escape route, although novels are always preferable, and, as one of the characters in Edward Eager’s bookish and wonderful Seven-Day Magic asserts, “the best kind of book…is a magic book.”

* * *

Eager’s magic series totaled only seven in number due to his untimely death at the age of fifty-three. Still, seven is the most magical of numbers, just enough books to last through a summer. One of the best summers I remember with my own son was the summer of Edward Eager, a glorious time when we read all of the books in the series aloud, often in a hammock, beside a pond that some people said was enchanted. Half Magic begins the series, with a troublemaking talisman found on the sidewalk that grants only half wishes, including a cat that can half-talk in a hilarious half-language. O, unpredictable magic, wise enough to make certain that the adults in the picture remain unaware of its powers! Children can see what adults cannot, in life and in Eager’s book. The novels that follow — Knight’s Castle, Magic by the Lake, The Time Garden, Magic or Not?, and The Well-Wishers — lead up to the final book, the brilliant Seven-Day Magic, which gets to the heart of Eager’s enchantments. Here, a library book that can be checked out only for seven days creates literary enchantment. When I read it I couldn’t help but think: how does Mr. Edward Eager know this is what happened to me in my library, on my summer vacation, when I first discovered Half Magic on the shelf? And then I understood what the best novels do: they know how you feel before you do.

My own work for children has been influenced by Eager and his creation of what I call suburban magic, and my aptly titled Practical Magic is a book for adults who can still remember what magic was all about. No enchanted woods, no brothers who turn into swans, no vine-covered cottages, but rather small towns where nothing unusual ever happens — until one day, it suddenly does. The suburbs would seem the least likely place in the world to find magic, and yet such places turn out to be rife with enchantment. Here every bit of enchantment matters, and each firefly counts. My own magical books for children occur in small towns and suburbs, often in the summer, often involving the characters who most need magic in their lives: the lonely, the unloved, the secret-keeper, the fearful, the outsider that most of us were at some point in childhood.

Here is the best thing about magic: you never know if it’s real or imagined. But as Eager suggested, “The next best thing to having it actually happen to you is to read about it…” As a child I found solace in books in a way I couldn’t in the real world. I understood, in some deep, immutable way, that even the powerless have power through imagination. That is the gift of magic and of Edward Eager’s books. All you have to do is walk out the door on a July afternoon and turn the corner, and magic will be waiting for you. All you have to do is read.

From the May/June 2015 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Transformations.

The post The Writer’s Page: In the Time of Daily Magic appeared first on The Horn Book.

#54 Half Magic by Edward Eager (1954)
38 points

Edward Eager writes the essential books about four children having a magical adventure. This one has a classic concept and brilliant working out. – Sondra Eklund

This is one of my own childhood favorites as well. And I’m happy to report that it remains popular to this day.  A couple  years ago we had a classroom of kids come into the children’s room. After I did my usual intro and such the kids were allowed to look for books. Suddenly they swarmed like fireants over the child who had said loudly from the fiction section, “Oh, SNAP! Edward Eager!” I am confident that this was the only time in history that those particular words were put in that order. Turned out that their teacher had been reading them Mr. Eager’s works in class. They were new and very receptive fans and I doubt very much that they are alone.

The plot, as American Writers for Children, 1900-1960 puts it is that, “four siblings find a magic talisman that grants their wishes, but only by halves. They engage in a variety of wild and funny adventures as each makes a wish, carefully worded to allow for the feature of half fulfillment. But when Jane wishes inadvertently for a fire, a playhouse burns, and when Martha thoughtlessly wishes the cat could talk, the semiarticulate feline engages in an exasperating flow of half-meaningless words. Cautiously Mark wishes for a desert-island adventure, but the four are almost kidnapped and able to escape only through use of the talisman. Romantic Katharine wishes for a jaunt through medieval times, in which she first rescues Sir Launcelot from a dungeon, then, finding him ungrateful, challenges him to single combat and soundly defeats him. In the end the children decide to pass on their talisman to two small children in another part of town.”

One of these days I’m going to hold a Children’s Literature Quiz night and some of the questions will involve guessing famous authors’ real names. For example, we all know Edward Eager, but I doubt that many of us would have necessarily known that his middle name was McMaken. Also, I think that many Eager fans have difficulty separating his words from the art of N.M. Bodecker. The “N.M.” stood for “Nils Mogens” by the way. There’s another quiz question for later.

For that matter, I wonder how many folks have just assumed that Eager was British? He wasn’t, y’know. Nope. Born and grew up in Toledo, Ohio he did. He died of lung cancer in 1964 at the age of fifty-three. And with this book, Eager began what he called the “daily magic” series. Strangely enough, that moniker has never really caught on. We just call them the Edward Eager books, don’t we? He wrote seven altogether, and only one (The Well Wishers) was in the first person. And his biggest influence (though he did love his Oz books) was E. Nesbit. You can see it if you read books like The Phoenix and the Carpet or Five Children and It. Both Nesbit and Eager were fans of grumpy magic and grumpy magical creatures.

I was always inordinately pleased with the crossover moments within these books. I loved that the kids in this book would return in Magic By the Lake and then later their children would rescue them in The Time Garden. No other author ever really played with time like Edward Eager.

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  5 Comments on Top 100 Children’s Novels #54: Half Magic by Edward Eager, last added: 5/25/2012
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  Sondy said, on 5/24/2012 7:30:00 AM
  

  I confess, my favorite Edward Eager is Seven-Day Magic, because I loved the magic book that writes about what the children are doing and it brings them into books, and it tells the formula for magic books (thwarting and being thwarted). But last time I listed that, and it didn’t make the top, so this time I thought I’d go with the most well-known. Also, I recently listened to a production of Half Magic on audio, and it really does hold up over the years. (So does Seven-Day Magic, but all of those books are classics, so I voted for Half Magic as a definitely worthy representative.)

  ChrisinNY said, on 5/24/2012 9:16:00 AM
  

  I debated between Half Magic and Seven Day Magic, but went with latter. (Sometimes I think my favorite is The Time Garden, though, too.) I loved, loved, loved Eager’s books as a child and even tracked down E. Nesbit books because of the in text reference I saw in one. Glad his writing is acknowledged here.

  Genevieve said, on 5/24/2012 9:50:00 AM
  

  Same as Sondy – my favorite is Seven-Day Magic, but I voted for it last time and it didn’t make the list, so I went with Half Magic this time since I like it nearly as much and Eager has got to be on the 100 list. (Three books in a row from my votes, after none at all up till now. O happy day!)
  Bodecker’s illustrations are pitch perfect. (I like Quentin Blake well enough, but couldn’t hold with his illustrations when Bodecker’s are out there.) Any other books he illustrated that I should know?

  Kathleen Krull said, on 5/24/2012 2:06:00 PM
  

  Hurray for EE.

  Brandy said, on 5/25/2012 6:41:00 AM
  

  This book is the one that caused my daughter to realize she had the power to read long chapter books on her own. I have a great deal of sentimental attachment to it for that. She actually ended up liking Seven Day Magic and Magic by the Lake better in the end, but still.

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WENDY BURTON!

Because I ended up posting Wendy’s comments on the blog yesterday… she’s our BBT Eager Reader today!  I love what Wendy has to say about Eager, especially her thoughts on his “borrowing” from Nesbit.  I, myself, “borrow” a lot and I prefer to be very obvious about it…

I think one of the things I loved best about Edward Eager books was the extreme ordinariness of the children and the world they lived in.  The kids in Eager books get bored, get disappointed, and have to go Baltimore instead of the Rockies.  They continually irritate each other and do stupid things.  But they have MAGIC.  Any child, reading these books, would have to feel like magic is waiting for them, too, if they wish on the right coins.  (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rubbed a sprig of thyme and sniffed, half-hoping I’d be sent back in time.)

You also get the feeling that the kids find ordinary things just as exciting and almost magical as the real magic: picnics with individual box lunches, going to a movie, swimming in the ocean, going to the library, and so on.  That’s how I felt as a kid about those things, and, of course, it’s even more how I feel about my childhood looking back on it as an adult.

The magic is necessary for me, though.  I’ve only reread Magic or Not? and The Well Wishers a couple of times (versus… I don’t know how many for the others.)  I just want to whisper to the kids that REAL magic is much better, and they ought to go get some.  It’s interesting: it seems there’s a large faction that think these two were Eager’s masterpieces, and the rest of us don’t care for them much at all; no one in between.

I’ve also read a review or analysis that claims The Time Garden is widely acknowledged to be Eager’s weakest work.  I don’t know who widely acknowledged that, but I don’t find it to be true.

As for the Nesbit issue… when I finally got around to reading some Nesbit–I was probably about 12, and it was The Enchanted Castle–I was sort of distressed.  I knew, of course, that Eager’s books were all Nesbit homage, but I didn’t expect them to be THAT close.  I thought they would just be sort of in the same style.  I was sad to acknowledge that Eager wasn’t as creative as I’d thought.  I enjoyed The Enchanted Castle, but haven’t picked up another Nesbit since then, maybe because I wanted to avoid cognitive dissonance.  But, scandalous as it is, I do sort of think that Eager’s books have aged better (except for the sexism and racism, of course, but these are what I expect to find in books written at that time).  The dialogue is snappier and funnier, and the prose is simpler.  Of course, I should probably READ some more Nesbit before I go around making statements like that–that’s what Eager wanted, after all.

Maybe that can be a summer project.  I’ve always been glad that he was so very blunt about borrowing from Nesbit–there are other authors who borrow almost as much and don’t acknowledge it.

Yep!  I’m a big believer in stealing openly.  Best just to hang the title of “thief” on yourself.  Fits better that way.  And this makes me wonder if readers know of other authors who’ve stolen so shamelessly…

MITALI PERKINS!

Many wonderful bloggers and writers have sent me their thoughts on Eager, but I decided to begin my Backwards Blog Tour with the fabulous  Mitali Perkins, (prolific author, friendly blogger, and organizer extraordinaire) because while she loves Eager, she also addresses an aspect of his work that I find, as an adult reader, problematic.

Mitali says:

I grew up loving Edward Eager. As a kid, I skipped over the strange ethnic stereotyping I now notice in some of his books. Maybe it’s because when it came to issues of race, Eager won my trust with “The Well-Wishers,” a story published in 1960 about a black family moving into an all-white town. The book could read like another “white people should welcome black people” didactic tale were it not for the twist Eager added of tough guy Dicky LeBaron’s mentoring of the new kid Hannibal. At age 11, I moved into an all-white town myself. When Dicky advises Hannibal, “Be yourself, dad, and like it,” I felt like he was talking to me, encouraging me, giving me permission to be brown. Read in 2009, “The Well-Wishers” can still inspire kids that to take a stand against injustice, thanks to Eager’s strong characters, deprecating humor, and good intentions, otherwise known as well-wishing.

I’m so glad that Mitali wrote this, because I had absolutely forgotten about Hannibal!  The Well Wishers and its partner-book Magic or Not? are less “magical” than Eager’s other books, and as such, I (a goofy magic-loving child) read them less often.  But in general, I think we need to talk more about this issue of race and historical context!

It’s something  I have trouble hammering out, for myself.  I heard the other day that several classics have recently been “updated” (is this true? does anyone know anything more about it? Mary Poppins? Really?!)  I had a violent reaction to the idea. But… I also find myself uncomfortable with leaving the books as they are…  Remember Achmed the A-rab in Half Magic?

Shiver!

And we can’t just censor the book, right?

RIGHT?

What do you think?

(yeah, this guy!)

NOW! Introducing and announcing with great fanfare!!! A brand-spanking new blog feature!  An invention!

EAGER READERS: A BACKWARDS BLOG TOUR!

Why a backwards blog tour? you ask…

No particular reason. Just seemed like fun!

What’s a backwards blog tour? you ask…

Well, instead of running around the blogosphere, answering other people’s random (and often repetitive) questions… I’m inviting other folks  here, to answer ONE question!

What question might that be? you ask…

Why, I’m glad you’re so curious!  The question is: WHAT DO  YOU REMEMBER/LOVE/ HATE ABOUT READING EDWARD EAGER? Hence the name of the blog feature: Eager Readers!

Now, right about this time you might be thinking, Hey, tthat sounds totally random, Laurel!

And it does sound random, I know…but  see, I have a reason for all of this madness.

Because my new book, Any Which Wall, is a tribute to Edward Eager.  Best known for having penned Half Magic, Eager in fact  wrote a slew of funny, imaginative books betwen 1952 and 1962.  In these books, regular children, living in America, encountered magic, made mistakes, and had a lot of fun in a an everyday way.  Eager really helped pave the way (along with his hero, Edith Nesbit) for all the magic books kids love today. Percy Jackson,  Potter, etc…

Though of course, he wasn’t perfect, and not everyone loves him as I do.  (and if you don‘t love him, please shoot me an email and tell me why!)

But in trying to learn more about him, and in attempting to track down his family, I hit brick walls everywhere.  There’s just not much to be found.  I went in search of his grandchildren, and came up empty handed…

So instead of skipping blithely around the blogosphere this month, talking about myself, and harassing you all with amazon links at every turn…  I thought I’d celebrate my book release by asking  the blogosphere to come over here, for a party, to discuss and share tidbits and memories about this mysterious man. Eagerly!

Do you loathe his treatment of women?

Do you admire his use of herb gardens?

Do you have a particular memory of something from one of his books?

PLEASE SHARE!

I hereby beg for/ request/ welcome/ invite thoughts from other people who have memories or thoughts about the books and life of Edward Eager.  I’d welcome anyone’s comments, and will happily post anything I get at laurelsnyder (at) hotmail.com.

Stay tuned for more!!!

Today, in preparation for next month’s publication of Any Which Wall, I set out to look for other fans of Edward Eager, since WALL is a kind of tribute to Eager.  I thought maybe I could interest Eager fans in MY BOOK!

But sadly, I have to report that there’s just nothing online about Eager.  No fan page, no fan club, nothing.

I find this hard to accept.  Eager has been in print for half a century.  He was a bestseller in his day, and every library I’ve ever set foot in has had a copy of Half Magic on its shelves.  I know countless people who love his books, and yet– I guess he just doesn’t inspite the kind of excitement required for fandom.

Which has me thinking about devotion, obsession.  What is it about some books that inspires frenzy?  Madness? Passion?  Eager’s books are, I guess, not those kinds of books.

They’re not the kind of books you have wild nights with. They’re just the kind of books you marry.