Half Magic

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Summary: Half Magic
Review: An avid reader as a child, I read this story many times, and over 20 years later, can still remember with amusement and affection the cat that went half of 'Miaow'. It was funny, clever, appealed to a child's imagination and sense of magic, certainly didn't seem to talk down, the way other writers seemed to.
It's an absolute classic which is sadly not as well-known as it deserves to be, and I would recommend it wholeheartedly.

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Summary: MAGICALY ENCHANTED
Review: Edward Eager wrote seven books, each featuring a gang of rambunctious kids with lots of ideas, plenty of stuffy grown-ups and boring rules to dislike, and E. Nesbit books to check out from the library, and a tendency to find magic stuff. Of course there's always a twist, and here it's that wishes don't always work as well as the kids want them to. There's also a love story tied into it--their widowed mother finds an odd but likeable man--and the usual pile of time travel, jewelry, and finger pointing when things go wrong.

The magic's main 'trick' may wear on a bit at the end, but all the different scenes feature fairly standard wishes that never turn out as expected and yet don't contain too much tortured explanation. Sometimes the situations have no visible magic, and there's even a humorous sort of ghost story. The best may be the passages where children look for magic or realize it's gone for the moment(time to use their heads,) or close to gone for good. Some mythological figures get taken down a peg for good measure, and even if it's all a bit slapstick, it hasn't been copied too heinously yet.

Except possibly by Eager. With each ensuing magic book his explanations get a bit more tortured, with the device to see historical or fictional characters becoming more complex. The characterizations become too exaggerated, and it's not as fun to believe. Maybe his own writing magic drained like the charm in the book--but like the charm near the end, it's still effective.

The drop off in enjoyment is something that I didn't see in Nesbit's more overtly original literary guide, E. Nesbit. Later Eager books force you to know a good bit about some middling established children's literature--and his previous books. But it definitely didn't start that way with Half Magic and its simple new idea. The dialogue makes great jumps, blending Important Questions Kids Have with accepted conventions of fantasy, i.e. the kids getting mad at being called elfspawn. The fantasy scenes are also memorable with the villains giving great laughs, and it's a very quick read. And you'll enjoy the pictures too.

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Summary: MAGICALY ENCHANTED
Review: Half Magic
This novel, is about 4 children looking for an adventure. One day the oldest of the children jane finds what she thinks is a nickel. It turns out to be a magical coin. this takes them on the adventure they have been looking for. It takes them to visit sir lancelot, a desert, and turns the littlest one into a ghost. Their mother feels like she is having a nervous breakdown and is becoming mentally ill. Will they get through all these adventures without getting killed by three knights and a half statue, half dog? I give this book 2 thumbs up. It is a marvelous book for children.

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Summary: Magic divided by two= A Great Fantasy
Review: Half Magic

Half Magic is a magical fantasy by Edward Eager. Edward Eager has written several books about magical adventures.
Half Magic begins when four children find an interesting looking coin in a crack in the ground. Soon they find out that if you wish something while holding the coin it comes half true. The children go on many magical adventures by wishing everything twice. After awhile the magic starts wearing down. The children decide to give the coin to another child so the magic can go on forever and ever.
I liked this story because it has lots of different settings. If you don't like fantasy very much you could enjoy this book because it travels into history and takes you through some historical events. I would recommend this book to a third grader up to a sixth grader who likes magic and adventures.

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Summary: Half Magic
Review: I have loved this book since I read it many years ago. My son is only four, but I thought he might be interested. rather than replace our bedtime story with this new book I simply bought the audio book and put it on in the car. what is so wonderful about it is that the voices of the characters are done by different actors. My son loved it. If you have a small child who is not quite ready for the whole book, I really suggest buying the audio book, it is unabridged and delightful. I only wish that the other books in the series were produced in this format.

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Summary: Fantastic---funny and brilliant!
Review: I read all of Edward Eager's books when I was a child and I have been reading them at least once a year ever since. If you haven't read any of them, start with Half Magic.

Four children---Jane, Mark, Katherine and Martha---find a magic nickel. The nickel gives the wisher only half of what he or she wishes for---which means that every magic adventure always turns out a little odd (even after the children have realized that they have to wish for twice of everything).

The characters are fantastic. I come from a family which has the exact same structure (girl, boy, girl, girl) as the children in Half Magic and I always saw my older sisters and brother in Jane (bossy), Katherine ("docile and a comfort to their mother"---which she brags about!) and Mark (the only boy who gets to lead a wonderful life as the only boy!). I'm sure my siblings also saw me in Martha (stubborn and with a wild streak!). Even if you don't come from a family like Martha's, you will recognize the characters immediately.

I can't recommend this highly enough. If you haven't read it, order it immediately (or at least run to the library to check it out---but you'll want to own this so you can read and re-read it again and again).

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Summary: Twice as Good as Your Average Book!
Review: Jane, Mark, Katherine and Martha (and their widowed mother) all have their lives turned topsy-turvy when Jane finds a magic talisman that resembles an ordinary nickel. How else but magic could four inquisitive children travel across time, joust with Sir Lancelot, have a tête-à-tête with Merlin, be captured by a Bedouin, become half-invisible, meet a talking cat AND find a new father, all in one week? The characterizations in this book make it one of my favorites by Mr. Eager. I am always impressed by Mr. Eager's ability to infuse cultural references into his stories and have them build up instead of take away from the plot. (One particularly nice touch was the mention of the star Barbara LaMarr in the movie the children go to see. This lets the reader place the time of the story, 1920s, by making the statement that "movies were silent then.") I highly recommend this book.

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Summary: A truly magic book
Review: Like all the other reviewers, I too read this book when I was 9 or 10 and then worked my way through the other 6 titles. I loved them all so very much that I read them again and again. Before I had reached my teens, they were like old and very dear friends. However, here in the UK, they've been out of print for quite some time and it looked as if my hope of owning my own set was never to be. As a librarian, I've frequently come across very old and battered copies of Half Magic in several Children's Libraries but about 10 years ago, I had the best piece of luck. I was working in a (nameless) library in Central London and came across a complete set in a store room as part of an out-of-print collection. I avidly fell upon them all and renewed old aquaintances with the children I'd thought of as my friends. When that collection was broken up for sale/pulping, I was given the 7 Edward Eager books for my own. Since then, I've read them to my own children. They are more than stories, they are part of me. Edward Eager had a huge gift; in a few words, he could paint a detailed picture with warmth, humour and clarity. His children are real and believable. The situations are zany and so funny and the magic that underpins everything is the same magic that lives in the readers' hearts and minds for ever. What a nice man he must have been. I wish I'd known him.

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Summary: One of my favorite childhood books
Review: There are some memories from childhood that I can never quite place specifically. Things that linger in memory, but are so faint that they are like a sniff of fresh apple pie from down the street that you can't determine which house it is coming from. I recall reading some "magic" children books--at one time, I thought they were Andre Norton, who had several young adult novels with the word magic in the title, but I was never able to find the exact one. Until I ran across this book in the store, and realized a chapter into it that I was eating apple pie.

I love this book, but it may be because I remember it so fondly. I've been trying to catch up on children's fantasy the last couple of years--reading E. Nesbit, Norton Juster, P.L. Travers, E.L. Konigsburg--and, of them all, Eager is my favorite. In Half Magic, fantasy is rolled with some of the logic of science fiction, in that the wishes that the magic coin gives the children only occurs in halves, and they must figure out how to use it. As children, they are quite believable--maybe not as realistic as Nesbit, but not the Bobsey Twins either.

I should note that Eager was himself a fan of Nesbit's, and his stories do resemble her's in some ways. His affinity for her is clearly laid out here, where the children visit the library and one of their favorite books is The Enchanted Castle.

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Summary: Half Magic is Wholly Wonderful
Review: This is an amazingly imaginative book I've known about and enjoyed for a long time, ever since bedtime stories. Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha are four ordinary kids in an ordinary place (the ever fascinating Toledo, Ohio) from an ordinary family who suddenly come across the extraordinary. At first it appears to be just another nickel laying on the sidewalk, but it turns out to be a magical token that will change these children's lives. What's even better is that it's not a completely right magic--when a wish is made only half of it comes true. (If you asked for two ice cream cones, you'd get one.) That makes the story even more lovable--besides the human, non-magical children, even the magic isn't perfect. The relationships of the brother and sisters in the story are great and the situations in which they find themselves are some that even we as readers without half-magic tokens can enjoy experiencing through the words on the pages. Deserts, knights and duels, circus bareback riding, talking cats, jewel thieves...anything is possible in Edward Eager's "Half Magic."