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[moon_custafer]

Been re-running E. Nesbitt’s The Magic City in my head, and suddenly realized that from an adult perspective this children’s fantasy may be the final act (and happy ending) of a melodrama of forbidden love and illegitimate birth – i.e., Philip’s “older half-sister” Helen, who is the only family he’s ever known, may actually be his mother, exiled to Brighton to run a boarding house in order to escape a scandal in her home town; in which case Lucy’s father, who apparently knew Helen years ago and is now finally free to marry her, may be Philip’s father too. Of course from the novel’s perspective this doesn’t really make any difference to the plot, and presumably Nesbitt’s original child audience were so used to families with (to us suspicious) age differences, this would all have just seemed part of the realistic everyday details that off set the fantasy elements.

ETA -
Then again, she did tend to write stuff that worked on two levels – the Bastables, frex, usually have no clue just how many rules of the adult world they’re breaking (I think they have a cameo in a novel she wrote for adults - the protagonists briefly encounter a gaggle of odd but likeable kids who take themselves very seriously).

I’m also thinking of the bit in Story of the Amulet where the kids bring a Babylonian queen to turn-of-the-century London, and neither she nor they can figure out why the police try to pick her up (then again, maybe they have her confused with that lady rampaging around stealing cabhorses and breaking lampposts with her bare hands).

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[crankydon.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

SPOILERS!

Love all the E. Nesbit stuff (and the American versions of pretty much the same universe by Edward Eager). There was one set of five books that comprised two intersecting trilogies that I especially liked. What sets them apart from a lot of the modern stuff is that there's no Mr. Exposition to explain to the characters any of the rules underlying the weird shit they've stumbled across. They have to figure it out themselves and with only your average kid's brains. For example, it takes practically the whole book for them to figure out that there's only one real magical gizmo in the heap of stuff that they've found but it's a wishing ring and someone's gone and wished for a bunch of magical artefacts. They're also very average kids in that they squabble with each other constantly in a very realistic manner.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Mr. Exposition sometimes there is, but they have to figure out how to ask the right questions.