Wet Magic, E. Nesbit (365 Books, Day 211)
Mar. 29th, 2011 03:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksThere are reasons this is not one of E. Nesbit's more famous books.
In point of fact, if I had been handed this and told it was written by L. Frank Baum as a remix of The Sea Fairies... hang on, I need to do a little bibliographical work here.
Right. The Sea Fairies was published in 1911. Wet Magic was published in 1913. Oh dear. They are similar enough that I actively hope Nesbit had not read the Baum.
At any rate, both of these books are fantasies about children who are taken under the sea by the mermaids, and what they see there. Baum's child is allowed to see the undersea fairyland because she is special, but Nesbit's five children earn their passage: they rescue a captured mermaid from a circus. By far the best parts of the book center around this rescue, in which the mermaid is haughty and vicious to them, and they do the right thing anyway, only to find after they've dumped her back into the ocean that the nastiness, and indeed every story that has ever drowned a sailor, is caused by a malady that affects mermaids when they get too dry, and that under ocean they are, even, physically different. The fine gradations of how annoying the mermaid is depending on what the air is like are very well done.
But the rest of this is a hot mess, several books shoved together in one and several plots; a lost-child-finding-parents plot, a war plot, a plot about characters out of books coming alive which depends far too much on one having read the books in question (and yet, paradoxically, far too much on the protagonists not having read them). Any one of the threads might have worked, but as it is the novel is too busy to produce solid, memorable characters and too crowded for real emotional tension. There are some very lovely individual bits round the edges, like the pot of water that pours the source of all rivers, or the fact that everyone always forgets that the water of oblivion tastes wonderful, but overall I cannot recommend this, even to profound Nesbit-enjoyers.
Nor, sadly, can I recommend the Baum, which is a book I treasured deeply as a small child and then discovered, upon growing up and learning more about sea life, to be full of terrible and book-destroying puns. I mean I like puns, if clever, and those were right out.
Therefore if you are in need of a book full of undersea magic, and the ocean the way one wants it, I suggest Jane Yolen's Neptune Rising. This one is not worth your time.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
In point of fact, if I had been handed this and told it was written by L. Frank Baum as a remix of The Sea Fairies... hang on, I need to do a little bibliographical work here.
Right. The Sea Fairies was published in 1911. Wet Magic was published in 1913. Oh dear. They are similar enough that I actively hope Nesbit had not read the Baum.
At any rate, both of these books are fantasies about children who are taken under the sea by the mermaids, and what they see there. Baum's child is allowed to see the undersea fairyland because she is special, but Nesbit's five children earn their passage: they rescue a captured mermaid from a circus. By far the best parts of the book center around this rescue, in which the mermaid is haughty and vicious to them, and they do the right thing anyway, only to find after they've dumped her back into the ocean that the nastiness, and indeed every story that has ever drowned a sailor, is caused by a malady that affects mermaids when they get too dry, and that under ocean they are, even, physically different. The fine gradations of how annoying the mermaid is depending on what the air is like are very well done.
But the rest of this is a hot mess, several books shoved together in one and several plots; a lost-child-finding-parents plot, a war plot, a plot about characters out of books coming alive which depends far too much on one having read the books in question (and yet, paradoxically, far too much on the protagonists not having read them). Any one of the threads might have worked, but as it is the novel is too busy to produce solid, memorable characters and too crowded for real emotional tension. There are some very lovely individual bits round the edges, like the pot of water that pours the source of all rivers, or the fact that everyone always forgets that the water of oblivion tastes wonderful, but overall I cannot recommend this, even to profound Nesbit-enjoyers.
Nor, sadly, can I recommend the Baum, which is a book I treasured deeply as a small child and then discovered, upon growing up and learning more about sea life, to be full of terrible and book-destroying puns. I mean I like puns, if clever, and those were right out.
Therefore if you are in need of a book full of undersea magic, and the ocean the way one wants it, I suggest Jane Yolen's Neptune Rising. This one is not worth your time.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
