I posted about the first of this trilogy the other day and am thrilled to have all three books available at this time. This was one of my all time favorite series (the Noel Streatfield "Shoes" series and C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" books were probably my top two series). The plot, in summary, sounds a bit cliche- children find a magical creature who grants wishes and the wishes, of course, go wrong and lessons are learned, but it's worth noting that these were written just after the turn of the last century.
Edith Nesbit was born in 1858 and wrote a good number of books. These are really for older children who will enjoy the historic context of the writing. Americans aren't as familiar with these books but I found them to be exotic (at the time, having lived/spent time in the UK, I see now how unexotic the setting was!).
Here is what Gore Vidal had to say about this series:
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/12/03/the-writing-of-e-nesbit/)
" To my mind, it is in her magical books that Nesbit is at her best. Her most successful family of children are known, simply, as The Five Children, and their adventures are told in The Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet. In the first volume, the children encounter a Psammead, a small bad-tempered, odd-looking creature from pre-history. The Psammead is able to grant wishes by first filling itself with air and then exhaling. (“If only you knew how I hate to blow myself out with other people’s wishes, and how frightened I am always that I shall strain a muscle or something. And then to wake up every morning and know that you’ve got to do it…”).
But the children use the Psammead relentlessly for their wishes, and something almost always goes wrong. They wish “to be more beautiful than the day,” and find that people detest them, thinking they look like Gypsies or worse. Without moralizing, Nesbit demonstrates, literally, the folly of human wishes, and amuses at the same time. In The Phoenix and the Carpet, the same family becomes involved with the millennial phoenix, a bird of awesome vanity (“I’ve often been told that mine is a valuable life.”). With the use of a magic carpet, the phoenix and the children make a number of expeditions about the world. Yet even with such an ordinary device as a magic carpet, Nesbit’s powers of invention are never settled easily. The carpet has been repaired. The rewoven section is not magic. So whoever sits on that part travels neither here nor there. Since most intelligent children are passionate logicians, the sense of logic is a necessary gift in a writer of fantasy. Though a child will gladly accept a fantastic premise, he will insist that the working out of it be entirely consistent with the premise. Careless invention is immediately noticed; contradiction and inconsistencies irritate; illusion is destroyed. Happily, Nesbit is seldom careless and she anticipates most questions which might occur to a child. Not that she can always answer him satisfactorily. A condition of the Psammead’s wishes is that they last only for a day. Yet the effects of certain wishes in the distant past did linger. Why was this? asked one of the children. “Autres temps, autres moeurs” replied the Psammead coolly.
In The Story of the Amulet Nesbit’s powers of invention are at their best. It is a time machine story, only the device is not a machine but an Egyptian amulet whose other half is lost in the past. By saying certain powerful words, the amulet becomes a gate through which the children are able to visit the past or future. Pharaonic Egypt, Babylon (whose dotty queen comes back to London with them and tries to get her personal possessions out of the British Museum), Caesar’s Britain: they visit them all in the search for the missing part of the amulet. Nesbit’s history is good. And there is even a look at a Utopian future, which turns out to be everything a good Fabian might have hoped for. Ultimately, the amulet’s other half is found, and a story of considerable beauty is concluded in a most unexpected way."
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