Whoops. Eight weeks after stating my intention to post something at least once a week, it looks like I finally slipped up and missed one. The irony is that this weekend I was actually less busy than I've been, tax season having just ended. (Well, technically it's not over till after Monday, but we had almost everyone wrapped up by Friday afternoon.) But it's only half past midnight, so maybe I'm still within the spirit of the plan.

February
Magic or Not?, Edward Eager (1959)

These are the fifth and sixth of the Edward Eager books. I don't know that I'd have much to say about them even if I weren't in a hurry to get this post up. The protagonists in both books are a new set of children, with no relation to the ones in the previous Eager books as far as I can tell. I like the characters a bit better than the past crews, but the stories here were less interesting. The central theme of Magic or Not? is that everything that happens may seem magical but also could have a non-magical explanation, which somehow wasn't as interesting to us.

April 6
The Well-Wishers, Edward Eager (1960)

Well-Wishers had an interesting gimmick in that it's narrated first-person by the various children in turn. That made it more fun to read aloud. . . . Um, in case you missed the earlier explanation, Ericka and I have been reading these books aloud to one another. With this one I monopolized most of the reading duties, since I liked trying to give each narrator a slightly different tone of voice, but then about halfway through I got tired and finally gave in and let Ericka read. (I'm still not sure if she knew that's what I was doing.)

At the end of Well-Wishers is a sort of epilogue in which, a few months later, some of the children have grown up a bit and they reminisce about their past adventures. It feels like a good ending for the series, but no: there's one more that we've just started. After that, we're probably on to E Nesbit — which is how Mr Eager would have liked it.

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