Five Children and it (Penguin Popular Classics)

by E.Nesbit (Author), RogerLancelynGreen (Introduction)

• Used

  Paperback
  1995

  $3.28

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $16.76

  Five children find a cantankerous sand fairy in a gravel pit. Every day It will grant them a wish - which leads to disastrous and hilarious results. In the introduction, Sandra Kemp examines Nesbit's life and her reading, showing how she was poised between the Victorian world and a new era in which children in literature were no longer mere projections of the adult viewpoint. She also examines how the narrative is structured around the acting out of literary fantasies, which always come back down to earth. Nesbit combines implausible events with the prosaic and familiar, and Kemp illuminates her exploration of the shifting relationship between imagination, literature and life.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1978

  $4.48

• New

  Paperback
  1993

  $6.77

  Its eyes were on long horns like a snail's eyes...it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick, soft fur...and it had hands and feet like a monkey's. 'It' was the Psammead, the grumpy sand-fairy that could, if in the mood, grant a wish a day. When the five children befriend him they find that each wish granted often has a sting in its tail. Golden guineas are too difficult to spend, wings let them down in a most inconvenient way, and when they wish for Red Indians, the children forget that they can sometimes be a little warlike. Generations of children have come to love the fantasy and the whimsy of the stories in the classic book from the author of The Railway Children.