"Not to everyone's taste, but his adult fans will snap it up. (Picture book. 5-9)"
The whimsical sweetness of Nesbit's original story and the richness of its early 20th-century language have both been stripped from this misguided attempt at retelling.
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"A delightful blend of period flavor, contemporary sensibility, and innovative composition. (Fiction. 8-12)"
One of the landmarks of children's fantasy: an enduring favorite first published in 1907, now reissued in the "Books of Wonder" series with a dozen splendid new color illustrations that extend an award-winning artist's already extraordinary range.
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"An excellent reminder of just how good a literary tale can be."
In a lengthy original fairy tale written nearly 100 years ago by one of the all-time greats of this form, a princess suffers the comical-logical effects of her unfortunately worded wish for hair that would "grow an inch every day, and grow twice as fast every time it was cut."
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"And even the whimsy has its redeeming triumphs — at least for those of us who can't resist an opening in which a child is summoned from his nursery blocks by Nurse's announcement: 'Master Lionel, dear, they've come to fetch you to go and be King."
The author's fans will welcome this edition of nine dragon stories, all but one of them written for The Strand Magazine in 1899 and published together a year later, though as they've generally aged less gracefully than her full-length novels we wouldn't choose this as any child's introduction to Nesbit.
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"A plum, pictured in the spirit of the period, and a sampling of Nesbit's rare goodness."
Done up in a merrie olde-time-Christmas jacket is the story of the Bastables and that most unpalatable of holiday puddings — O.E. and Alice "went and begged for money for poor children, and then kept it!"
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"Neither bitter nor sentimental, her own memories illuminate her early years better than Anthea Bell's Walck monograph, the most recent of the studies of Nesbit."
Of particular interest to specialists in children's literature, this book, which is not without interest, really, hasn't much hope of gaining an audience beyond that small market.
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"But there's a hurdle to take in marketing it today."
If you, too, were brought up on E. Nesbit — if you felt as though the Bastable children were personal friends, it would be hard for you to be objective about The Phoenix and the Carpet.
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"The following plays are retold: A Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear."
To most people this is a wholly new book, for the routine lists of E. Nesbit's books have not included it and it has been out of print for years.
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Another Nesbit reprint is good news — and this, though less familiar to Nesbit fans than its predecessors, is a first rate story, and lives up to the Nesbit tradition for creating children that live, grown-ups seen through children's eyes, and an inimitable blend of humor and commonsense and magic.
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"The new pictures by J.S. Goodall, unfortunately, have such an old-fashioned quality that they belie the timelessness of the story and give the book a dated look."
This is the third of the trilogy beloved by those who first met E. Nesbit through her Five Children and It, and The Phoenix and the Carpet.
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