I'm sure this was high praise for Eager, considering how he idolized her. And, more relevantly to those of us on r/fantasy, he wrote a handful of kids' books that are magical.

He went on to write lyrics, radio scripts, and tv adaptations of opera classics. After doing a handful of these on children's authors, I decided to volunteer to do more in the same vein, so here's my standard blurb about why: I am a firm believer that good literature transcends age, so reading a classic children's lit book is just a good reading habit! Next, if you have kids in your life (of your own, related to you, if you're a teacher, etc), finding lots of great books to read to them, with them, or recommend to them is a great thing.įor anyone growing up in the 60s - 80s who frequented the children's section of their libraries and who loved magical books, more than likely you bumped up against Edward Eager's classic Half Magic and maybe a few of his others.Įdward Eager was a Harvard-educated playwright who left the illustrious school after writing a successful play. So it's no surprise if you've been reading my author appreciations that I love children's lit. Here is a complete list of appreciations to date.

Even as a child I was savvy enough to catch the biggest name-drop in the book which was the multiple references to the books by E Nesbit, and I know that when I finished this series her books were the next ones to be checked out.This post is part of r/fantasy 's series of Author Appreciation posts, focusing on lesser known (or well known but lesser discussed, possibly forgotten) authors, as organized and masterminded by u/The_Real_JS. I wonder if parents reading this book aloud to their children in the 50s got a laugh seeing these things in print. Now with the power of the Internet they are just a quick Googling away. They drop lots of references to fictional characters or real people or real publications that just sailed right over my head when I read this before. These children are of course fictional children written by an adult. I feel almost like it's going back three generations and that's pretty wild. Rereading them now as an adult the book is a lot shorter than I remember and of course it reads like a book written in the 50s about life in the 20s because that's exactly what it is. Some of the parts really stuck with me and I remember hunting down the rest of the series and enjoying most of them. I read this book as a kid because my parents had read this book as a kid (it would have just been released for them).

Half magic by edward eager