Wizards and dragons are not all they seem to be, and when they begin mixing the magic with other books and modern-day events, things get out of hand until the children can learn to follow the magical rules and find their own happy endings. In this last book of the series, a whole new set of characters take center stage for another magical adventure! These children love visiting the library every week and checking out piles of books, and when Susan finds a mysterious old book without a title, she opens it to discover that the book is all about her and her friends making wishes and going on adventures! The children take turns making their wishes on the book with mixed results. We ended up staying up til 10 (bedtime is supposedly at 9) to finish each chapter several times in our nights of reading this. Eager's chapters are always really, really long. I found myself wondering if there's a lot of Eager himself in Barnaby (full of ideas, aware he's more intelligent than anyone else, kind at heart, but given to defensively using biting sarcasm to make up for his scrawniness and short stature).Ģ. The 'Barnaby the wanderer' chapter is much more philosophical than anything else of Eager's that I've read. We actually tried to read Knight's Castle a few months back, but had to give up, because T was confused by and uninterested in all the Ivanhoe references - something I didn't mind as a child despite not having read Ivanhoe (or seen the movie, as the kids do in that book).ġ.

A potential reader of this book would certainly do well to be familiar with those books. So, Tommy's frustrations aside, I still came away from the book with a certain satisfaction that I do seem to be producing a well-read child (even though he's not reading any of these on his own). Later on, we were briefly excited when The 13 Clocks got mentioned. Then he got frustrated, because the chapters stopped being about books so much, and the children never visited the world of The Hobbit, which he'd been desperately hoping for, despite one of the characters suggesting it as a possibility.

So it was exciting to him, that the first magical adventure referenced the Oz books, the second Half Magic and the third the Little House books, all of which he's somewhat familiar with. Tommy was enthusiastic, especially at first, because he has lately been really into spotting 'references' in books and TV shows (this largely brought about by his current fixation with The Simpsons). I know I read this as a child, but it must have been only once, because so much of it seemed fresh and new to me.

Edward eager magic series