The Story of the Amulet

London, 23rd November 1905<br /><br />Dear Virginia,<br /><br /><i>The Story of the Amulet</i> is at last finished, and I delivered it to the publishers yesterday! I must admit that I am not entirely satisfied, and maybe I should not have spent quite so much time discussing it with my dear friends at the Fabian Society. At first I was flattered by the keen interest they took, but after a while I almost began to feel that I was writing their book, rather than mine. <br /><br />Mr. Wells, I am sorry to say, was the most egregious offender. I unwisely revealed to him at an early stage that Time Travel would feature largely in the plot - this topic, as you doubtlessly know, is close to his heart - and he gave me altogether more advice than I knew what to do with. I hold him in the very highest regard, but I have my own ideas on the subject, in particular on the curious paradoxes that would arise if a Time Machine could ever be constructed and we were able to visit the past. I am sure I have not presented these thoughts in the best possible way, but I feel they contain promise, and I shall not be altogether surprised if other authors continue where I have left off. At any rate, I was sufficiently irritated with Mr. Wells that I was unable to refrain from teasing him the tiniest amount in the chapter where my young heroes visit the Future. I do hope he will take it in good part!<br /><br />The other person whose influence you will immediately notice is Doctor Budge of the British Museum, who has taken so many hours from his important duties to explain the mysteries of Archaeology and answer all my foolish questions. By including him in the story, I hoped I might find some little way to thank him. At first, I thought that what he lacked most in his life was the natural affection that comes so readily to young girls. I did my best to let my dear little Anthea give him what I could not; but in the end, I decided that this was not what he truly wanted. I hope I have given him a more suitable reward for the many kindnesses he has shown me, and it is with great trepidation that I await his judgement.<br /><br />Alas, even if Doctor Budge declares himself well pleased, I must say again that I am not. I know what I want to say, and again I know that I have not quite said it. But I feel that next time I will succeed. I have started making notes; there will be some new children (I can already see Gerald and Mabel), and a Castle, and a Ring, and a love story. I will tell you more in my next letter!<br /><br />Affectionately yours,<br /><br />Edith<br />

<b>If you could be granted your heart's desire - what would you wish for?</b><br><br><img src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328301438l/6059113.jpg" width="400" height="500" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> <br><br>A magical amulet takes the children from Victorian London to ancient civilizations far distant in time. (My favorite - Atlantis.)<br><br><i>How the Psammead came to London - a story with a bite!</i><br>'All right,' said the Psammead, in offended tones. 'I'm sure I don't want to tell you a long tale. A man caught me, and I bit him. And he put me in a bag with a dead hare and a dead rabbit. And he took me to his house and put me out of the bag into a basket with holes that I could see through. And I bit him again. And then he brought me to this city, which I am told is called the Modern Babylon—though it's not a bit like the old Babylon—and he sold me to the man you bought me from, and then I bit them both. Now, what's your news?'<br>'There's not quite so much biting in our story,' said Cyril regretfully; 'in fact, there isn't any.<br><br><i>The magic begins...</i><br>"Please we want to know where the other half of the charm is.'<br><br>'The part of the Amulet which is lost,' said the beautiful voice, 'was broken and ground into the dust of the shrine that held it. It and the pin that joined the two halves are themselves dust, and the dust is scattered over many lands and sunk in many seas.'<br><br>'Oh, I say!' murmured Robert, and a blank silence fell. <br><br>'Then it's all up?' said Cyril at last; 'it's no use our looking for a thing that's smashed into dust, and the dust scattered all over the place.'<br><br>'If you would find it,' said the voice, 'You must seek it where it still is, perfect as ever.'<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1567421984i/28088082._SY540_.png" width="400" height="350" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><br><i>The first adventure in time and space...</i><br>Here was a horrible position! Four English children, whose proper date was A.D. 1905, and whose proper address was London, set down in Egypt in the year 6000 B.C. with no means whatever of getting back into their own time and place.<br><br><i>The learned gentleman...</i><br>'I'll go to Babylon if you like,' said Jane abruptly, and the others hastened to say 'Done!' before she should have time to change her mind.<br><br>'Ah,' said the learned gentleman, smiling rather sadly, 'one can go so far in dreams, when one is young.' He sighed again, and then adding with a labored briskness, 'I hope you'll have a—a—jolly game,' he went into his room and shut the door.<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1567421161i/28088045.png" width="300" height="300" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><i>Escaping from a Babylonian dungeon...</i><br>'UR HEKAU SETCHEH,' she cried in a fervent voice. 'Oh, Nisroch, servant of the Great Ones, come and help us!'<br><br>There was a waiting silence. Then a cold, blue light awoke in the corner where the straw was—and in the light they saw coming towards them a strange and terrible figure. I won't try to describe it, because the drawing shows it, exactly as it was, and exactly as the old Babylonians carved it on their stones, so that you can see it in our own British Museum at this day. I will just say that it had eagle's wings and an eagle's head and the body of a man.<br><br>It came towards them, strong and unspeakably horrible.<br><br> <img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1567421030i/28088039._SY540_.gif" width="400" height="600" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><i>The Fall of Atlantis...</i><br>They could not bear to look down, for the wave had broken on the face of the town, sweeping over the quays and docks, overwhelming the great storehouses and factories, tearing gigantic stones from forts and bridges, and using them as battering rams against the temples. Great ships were swept over the roofs of the houses and dashed down halfway up the hill among ruined gardens and broken buildings. The water ground brown fishing–boats to powder on the golden roofs of Palaces.<br> <br>Then the wave swept back towards the sea.<br><br>The hills around were black with people fleeing from the villages to the mountains. And even as they fled thin smoke broke from the great white peak, and then a faint flash of flame. Then the volcano began to throw up its mysterious fiery inside parts. The earth trembled; ashes and sulphur showered down; a rain of fine pumice–stone fell like snow on all the dry land. The elephants from the forest rushed up towards the peaks; great lizards thirty yards long broke from the mountain pools and rushed down towards the sea. The snows melted and rushed down, first in avalanches, then in roaring torrents. Great rocks cast up by the volcano fell splashing in the sea miles away.<br><br>Oh, this is horrible!' cried Anthea. 'Come home, come home!'<br><br>'The end of the dream,' gasped the learned gentleman.<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1567421792i/28088072._SX540_.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><i>Drama with Victorian/Edwardian accents...</i><br>There was an awful silence. Then Pharaoh spoke.'<br><br>Take the sacred house of the beast from them,' he said, 'and imprison all. Tonight after supper it may be our pleasure to see more magic. Guard them well, and do not torture them—yet!'<br><br>'Oh, dear!' sobbed Jane, as they were led away. 'I knew exactly what it would be! Oh, I wish you hadn't!'<br><br>'Shut up, silly,' said Cyril. 'You know you WOULD come to Egypt. It was your own idea entirely. Shut up. It'll be all right.'<br><br>'I thought we should play ball with queens,' sobbed Jane, 'and have no end of larks! And now everything's going to be perfectly horrid!'<br><br> <img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1567421360i/28088051._SX540_.gif" width="600" height="300" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><i>How coinage was introduced to ancient Egypt...</i><br>'And here's twopence for yourself.'<br><br>The soldier looked at the twopence.'What's this?' he said.<br><br>Robert explained how much simpler it was to pay money for things than to exchange them as the people were doing in the market. Later on the soldier gave the coins to his captain, who, later still, showed them to Pharaoh, who of course kept them and was much struck with the idea. That was really how coins first came to be used in Egypt. You will not believe this, I daresay, but really, if you believe the rest of the story, I don't see why you shouldn't believe this as well.<br><br><i>Traveling into the far past...</i><br>'Where are we?' whispered Anthea.<br><br>'And when?' whispered Robert.<br><br>'This is some shrine near the beginnings of belief,' said the Egyptian shivering. 'Take the Amulet and come away. It is cold here in the morning of the world.'<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1579871567i/28833931.jpg" width="400" height="500" alt="description" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> <br><br><b>Follow the four Victorian children as they explore the ancient past while seeking their "heart's delight".</b><br><br>Enjoy!<br><br>

<b>Childhood Archaeology</b><br><br><i>The Story of the Amulet</i> is the third of Edith Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy, about four children in Edwardian England who find a sand-fairy (a cantankerous creature like a dilapidated monkey with bat ears and snail eyes) with the power to grant wishes. After the calamities that follow some ill-considered wishes in the first volume, <i><a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/45181.Five_Children_and_It__Five_Children___1_" title="Five Children and It (Five Children, #1) by E. Nesbit" rel="noopener">Five Children and It</a>,</i> they agree that it will only grant the wishes of others, but will still advise the children on their other adventures. So at the start of this book, it tells them to buy an ancient amulet, or sacred pendant, spied in a London junkshop. Unfortunately, the charm is incomplete, but the remaining half does have the power to transport the children to any place where it had been in the past, so they may reunite the two halves.<br><br>+ + + + + +<br><br>I have a dilapidated (and thus worthless) first edition of this, bought for my father in 1906, the year of its publication. He read it to me as a child. Looking at it now makes me realize how much my imagination was shaped by our travels through its glowing arch to ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, and Tyre. And it gave me a taste for similar stories. My father, as I now see, adopted its structure to make up bedtime tales of his own, much as C. S. Lewis was famously to do later with his Narnia adventures. Unlike Lewis, though, Edith Nesbit has no religious overtones. But as a leading Fabian, she had strong socialist convictions which also appear in the book; I can only guess as to its influence on my own beliefs today.<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1502215136i/23535662._SY540_.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>For some reason, I never read the book to my own children. Perhaps I was afraid that it might seem too dated, and would appeal too little to their interests; children no longer learned Latin and Greek in school and seemed to be less interested in ancient cultures. But nowadays the datedness would be much of the attraction. Nesbit's books are now a double feat of archaeology, opening portals not only on the distant past, but also on the lives of children in Edwardian London and the social conditions that they would have taken for granted. As such, it is certainly worth revisiting by adults. I am even wondering whether I might try it on my grandchildren. If I do, I would absolutely want an edition like the present one, which retains the original illustrations by H. R. Millar. It is not that he brings the distant civilizations any more to life than in Nesbit's words, which weave a spell all on their own. But he perfectly captures qualities that were so obvious to the author that she did not even need to describe them: the four children, Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, looking absurdly overdressed in their Norfolk jackets or pinafores, their social attitudes as "emissaries from the empire where the sun never sets" coming through clearly from every sketch.<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1502215136i/23535663._SY540_.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br>Not that Nesbit herself is a strong proponent of Empire; she is no Kipling, Rider Haggard, or Henty. Indeed, as so often in the book, she treats these matters with what seems to me a delicious touch of irony. Here is Cyril talking about missionaries: <br><blockquote> <i>Well, they always take the savages beads and brandy, and stays, and hats, and braces, and really useful things—things the savages haven't got and never heard about. And the savages love them for their kind generosity, and give them pearls and shells and ivory and cassowaries. </i>[...]<i> The great thing is to get people to love you by being generous.</i> </blockquote>But in Cyril's mouth, that last word is not ironic at all. We may scoff at the "generosity" of bringing corsets and suspenders to native peoples, but the way the four children treat one another and the world around them is politeness and generosity itself. There is one lovely little episode where they take pity on a disheveled orphan girl they meet in the park, and unite her with a bereaved mother in ancient Britain. And their encounters with the "poor learned gentleman" who occupies the top floor of their temporary lodgings near the British Museum are a perfect mixture of courtesy and friendship, adopting him as a kind of honorary playmate. This character, incidentally, is a tribute to the dedicatee of the book, Dr. Wallis Budge, an Egyptologist at the Museum and Nesbit's primary consultant.<br><br>What Nesbit made of Budge's knowledge reads as something creative and fresh, even today. She has a lovely way of talking to her child readers, especially when airily glossing over the more unlikely parts of her story, and she can achieve real magic when she needs to. The scene when the amulet first comes alive and fills the room with its glowing light thrilled me all over again, even now. But she also has the sense to realize that eight or nine forays into the past would soon become repetitive, no matter how different the historical scenery. So she cleverly varies the pace. The children take the Learned Gentleman with them on their trip to Atlantis (he believes he is dreaming). They drop off the little orphan girl on their way to visit Julius Caesar. When they make friends with the Queen of Babylon, she expresses a wish to see their country, and soon she is walking around London, making wishes which the Psammead has to grant, despite the consequences. There is even a sequence when they journey into the future, a sort of William Morris Utopia of garden cities and perfectly behaved children, oddly prophetic of the theories of modern urban planning, if not the less salubrious results. Unfortunately, Nesbit uses these modern sections to expound her social views, and they do get a bit preachy. And when the children make a second visit to Egypt, they find themselves in the middle of a workers' riot that might almost be Petrograd in 1917. But that visit also introduces them to another time-traveler, Rekh-Mara, the priest of Amen-Ra, who returns to link several of the later episodes. The climax, in which the two halves of the amulet are rejoined and the Learned Gentleman becomes one with the Egyptian priest, is moving in its simplicity, bringing tears to my eyes.

<br /><br />This was one of my favorite books when I was growing up. I decided to re-read it as part of my research for the memoir I am writing. I have a tattered copy of the 1965 Puffin paperback edition, which came free with any purchase at a used bookstore. The pages are yellowed but they are all there as well as the perfect illustrations by H R Miller.<br /><br />The Story of the Amulet is a sequel to The Five Children and It, which I also read long ago. But the Amulet always stands out in my memory because I "discovered" it on the shelves of our local library in Princeton, NJ, where our mom took us every two weeks. Upon reading it, I had my mind blown for perhaps the first time in my life. I wanted to see if I could figure out why and I did.<br /><br />There are four English children in this story who find themselves spending their summer holidays in a dreary old house on Fitzroy Street, London (near the British Museum) in the care of their old Nurse. Father has gone to Manchuria to report on the war and Mother plus The Lamb (the new baby in the family) is in Madeira recovering from an illness. When I first read this book, probably at the age of nine, I had no idea about any of these places. But the writing is like a spell that just pulled me in to these children's lives, their relationships with each other and of course, their adventures. I am sure I had already read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at least once, so I was in a sense primed but Nesbit is a magician whereas C S Lewis only wished he was.<br /><br />Because what entranced me back then and again now, was the magic. It is magic the way children do magic, fully ensconced in their imaginations. In fact, most grownups are at least annoyed by such a degree of imagination and some are truly alarmed. I recall being told as a child that something I said was "all in my imagination" and thinking, "Where else would it be?" Children know full well what is imagination and what is reality plus are able to move freely between the two. Such is the case with Anthea, Cyril, Robert and Jane, though Jane being the youngest, is the most easily frightened and sometimes protests when the magic gets to be too much. Yes! That is just the way it was in my life.<br /><br />So there is an amulet, but the children only have half of it. The Psammead, a sand fairy who helplessly grants wishes and was the "It" of Five Children and It, reappears and though the children had promised the Psammead at the end of the previous summer not to ask for another wish as long as they lived, he does inform them that should they find the other half of the amulet, they can realize their hearts' desire.<br /><br />After learning to use the amulet's magic they are off: to ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, etc. All these places are dangerous in the extreme but full of wondrous delights as well. Again, as a child, I knew virtually nothing about these places, yet they were so real to me back then as I read. I grew up to love books about Atlantis and Egypt and with a hunger to know the history of such ancient times. That is truly magic on many levels.<br /><br />Since I began working at Once Upon A Time Bookstore, which serves a whole community of children, young mothers, teachers and grandparents, I have rediscovered children's literature and much of it is still great reading, but Nesbit is the inventor of the children's adventure story. She influenced C S Lewis, P L Travers (Mary Poppins), Diana Wynne Jones and J K Rowling, but being the originator, she is still the best.

I read some E. Nesbit as a child, and felt that she was an author I should like, but somehow never really warmed to her. The writing style was a bit too stilted, even for my tastes, which were decidedly more old fashioned than those of my peers. I appreciate her now much more, now that I've learned of her place in the larger context of children's literature, and realize how radical and inventive she was for her time. Also, the subtle deadpan humor in the interactions between the children is something I've come to appreciate in my recent rereadings. Anyway, as far as this particular book is concerned, I know we had a copy of this Puffin edition in our household when I was a child (I remember that blue striped dress vividly), and I'm fairly sure that I at least made an attempt at reading it. The episode when the ancient queen arrives in modern London seemed so familiar. I have some doubts though -- maybe I know that scene because the queen's comment about the slaves being treated badly gets quoted so often, or maybe I'm remembering a very similar scene in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/65605.The_Magician_s_Nephew__Chronicles_of_Narnia___6_" title="The Magician's Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6) by C.S. Lewis" rel="noopener">The Magician's Nephew</a>? I do know that whether I attempted The Amulet or not, I didn't finish it, so the ending of this book was quite new to me, and surprised me with a couple poignant moments that had me sniffing a little. I chose to read it now largely in preparation for a modern day addition to this series which I hope to read soon, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/22593410.Five_Children_on_the_Western_Front" title="Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders" rel="noopener">Five Children on the Western Front</a> by present day author Kate Saunders, which takes the children to adulthood and WWI. Of course, such a book has the potential to be disastrously bad, but I'm still quite curious to see what Saunders has done with Squirrel, Panther, the Lamb and the others.

In this third volume of the series (following Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet), Nesbit finally succumbs to the temptation to get socialist and preachy. There is a revolt of the workers in Ancient Egypt where the rabble-rouser addressed the rabble with 'Comrades!', a visit to a socialist utopian London of the future where <s>Boris Johnson is mayor</s> Wells, as in 'H. G.' is considered a good boy's name, and some pithy observations from the Queen of Babylon when she magically trips through space and time to visit London: <br /><br /><i>"And now from the window of a four-wheeled cab the Queen of Babylon beheld the wonders of London. Buckingham Palace she thought uninteresting; Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament little better. But she liked the Tower, and the River, and the ships filled her with wonder and delight. <br />'But how badly you keep your slaves. How wretched and poor and neglected they seem,' she said, as the cab rattled along the Mile End Road. <br />'They aren't slaves; they're working-people,' said Jane.<br />'Of course they're working. That's what slaves are. Don't you tell me. Do you suppose I don't know a slave's face when I see it? Why don't their masters see that they're better fed and better clothed? Tell me in three words.' <br />No one answered. The wage-system of modern England is a little difficult to explain in three words even if you understand it—which the children didn't."</i><br /><br />But I don't mind it when people wear their hearts on their sleeves. And my storm-the-Winter-Palace side (that's the pretty one) is in agreement with the QoB here anyhow.<br /><br />C. S. Lewis obviously mined his childhood memories of this book extensively, with the King of Babylon (may He live forever) being a dead ringer for a Calormene and the Queen of Babylon's visit to modern London being, er, luckily unnoticed by any copyright lawyers by Jadis' time.

One summer holiday in the country four London siblings Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane discovered a strange creature, a Psammead or sand-fairy who granted wishes – a mixed blessing as they soon found out. The Christmas that followed found them lumbered with a Persian carpet and a Phoenix which got them into further scrapes.<br /><br />Now it’s the next summer and they are staying in a London house owned by their old Nurse; left to their own devices, the heart’s desire of all four is to have their parents return home from abroad, one from reporting from the Russo-Japanese war in Manchuria, the other recuperating in Madeira. When the bored children start visiting shops selling caged animals they come across an old friend in dire straits who needs rescuing.<br /><br />It is the Psammead, of course. And he has a plan to help each and every child achieve their heart’s desire.<br /><br />When I first read this it felt very episodic – not surprising given that many of Nesbit’s books were first published in magazines in serial form – and thus slightly disjointed, rather like an incomplete tale told by Scheherade. A second read however revealed <i>The Story of the Amulet </i>to be a more cohesive narrative than expected, a quest for the other half of an ornamental object imbued with ancient magic and activated by speaking the name inscribed on it. This talisman, a <i>thet</i> or<i> tyet </i>amulet also called the knot of Isis, is now believed to represent a sacred cloth folded in a distinctive way and somehow a symbolic representation of life. Its symmetrical appearance also seems to imply a mystical union, an aspect that in fact comes to be in the course of the telling.<br /><br />But the core of the narrative describes the close relationship between the siblings and their befriending of a learned gentleman lodging with their Nurse. He believes that the tales the children tell and his experiences when he joins them in their travels are all part of vivid waking dreams he’s experiencing. So when he sees the Queen of Babylon in London or Britain on the eve of the Caesar’s invasion, and meets an Egyptian priest from millennia before or is present at the fall of Atlantis, he is convinced that it is all simply unreal and due to some kind of hallucination.<br /><br />The children know otherwise, having experienced similar madcap adventures in<i> Five Children and It</i> and, later,<i> The Phoenix and the Carpet</i>. Nesbit, having done her research, is able to bring the adventures to life with unforced descriptions of what was then supposed to be authentic recreations of past cultures, from prehistoric Britain to Babylon, Atlantis to Gaul, Egypt to a future Britain, and ancient Phoenicia to Syria (when they visit the Phoenix of the second book).<br /><br />But however much she re-envisions historic places it’s how she recreates the life of close siblings at the turn of the 20th century that most delights, and how they try to appease the grumpy but grateful Psammead. Cyril the putative leader who parades his own learning, Robert the impulsive brother, and Jane the youngest who’s also the most timid and squeamish – they all come over as believable. But it is Anthea, the elder sister, who’s most impressive, sensitive to the Psammead’s moods, pouring oil on troubled waters, coming up with sensible solutions; can we credit her with being Nesbit’s <i>alter ego </i>in this novel?<br /><br />It’s the undercurrent of humour that most impresses me this time round – the asides (either from characters or in commentary by the author), the misunderstandings and mishaps, the wordplay that somehow effects change, and so on. How does time travel work, and how do the children understand and speak with denizens of the past? It’s all explained, and if it’s not clear then either the Psammead or Nesbit will say it’s too difficult to clarify, and we have to just accept it. Along with the humour I also acknowledge Nesbit’s use of language which, more than a century on, is virtually as comprehensible to us as serious adult fiction of the time is often not so. Any unfamiliar word is easily understood from its context.<br /><br />Dedicated to the scholar Wallis Budge, who helped her with the historical minutiae, <i>The Story of the Amulet</i> wears its learning relatively lightly on its sleeve. I loved it and would recommend it; but don’t take my word for it – the fact that C S Lewis’s <i>The Magician’s Nephew</i>, Edgar Eager’s <i>Half Magic</i> and Diana Wynne Jones’s <i>The Homeward Bounders</i> all owe something to this novel should alert the reader to the fact that its magic is only partly to do with the amulet and the sand-fairy.

Not good. <br /><br />The kids and I really enjoyed Nesbit's first two books with these characters. They were essentially a series of "corrupted wish" stories, moral tales, but with a bit of cheeky subversiveness and plenty of satirical commentary for us grown-ups. <br /><br />This third book revisits the Psammead who the children find for sale in a pet store; but he no longer grants them wishes (he does, however, feel the obligation to grant wishes to anyone within earshot who might give voice to a wish, and this does lend some amusement). Instead, the central object of the story -- a half-amulet discovered by the children -- becomes a sort of time-travel device, sending the children across the world (and history) as they search for the other half.<br /><br />While this should make for as many amusing adventures as the first two books, instead the book feels more weighed down by its premise than buoyed up. It also seemed that Nesbit never could quite nail down the mechanics of the amulet. For example once the other half is found, it turns out to be the same half, which somehow creates a whole, but then there's a third half (yeah, you read that right) somewhere along the way, too. <br /><br />There is still some fun to be had, for example, when the children bring a Babylonian queen back to London and much chaos ensues. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that this portion inspired a smiliar sequence in C.S. Lewis's <i>The Magician's Nephew</i>, given that Lewis references Nesbit's Bastable children in the very first lines of that book. The upstairs neighbor who gets dragged along on several travels might even be where Lewis ultimately got the inspiration for Uncle Andrew. (Except "Jimmy" is pleasant and kind.)<br /><br />Other elements suggest a bit more sophistication in regard to the depiction of time-travel than one might expect from a century-old book. A chapter where the children decide to explore a futuristic London is particularly fascinating as it gives us a glimpse of how Nesbit saw what the future might hold. <br /><br />Those portions aside, this book is still not nearly as good as the two which preceded it. Much of the humor, charm and satire of the first two books, which played out in the interactions between the children and the Psammead or Phoenix, is missing here, and the resolution is the sort of freaky-weird mysticism that was popular in Nesbit's day. <br /><br />Unless you're set on reading all three books, this one can be skipped without really missing out.

E. Nesbit wrote a ton of great children’s books that are sadly neglected, though Puffin Classics appears to be reprinting them. I generally don’t find them in large bookstores, but have had several lucky finds in local resale bookstores. (And of course there's always Project Gutenberg.)<br /><br /><i>The Story of the Amulet</i> is about Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane, the same four children who are featured in <i>Five Children and It</i> (the fifth child was their baby brother) and <i>The Phoenix and the Carpet</i>. In this book, their old friend the Psammead (the “It” of the first book mentioned) turns up in a pet shop in London. The kids rescue it, and it points them toward an Amulet for sale in a nearby curiosity shop. The Amulet is, in fact, a magic amulet from ancient times, and it has the power to give the children their heart’s desire.<br /><br />Alas, what they have purchased is only half the Amulet. However, even the half has powers, one of which is transportation through space and time. So the children embark on a quest to find the other half and the connecting pin, so that they may have their hearts’ desire, which is the safe return of their parents and baby brother. Their mother has been ill and is off recuperating, and their father is a war correspondent. Meanwhile, they are living in London with their old nurse. I think I am not giving anything away when I say that the children have several exciting adventures and finally recover the Amulet and their family members.<br /><br />Nesbit is always an entertaining read, sometimes more so as an adult. I’d recommend her to anyone who is looking for something relaxing and amusing.

Definitely my least favorite of the three (the first books being <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/45181.Five_Children_and_It" title="Five Children and It by E. Nesbit" rel="noopener">Five Children and It</a> and <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/97090.The_Phoenix_and_the_Carpet" title="The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit" rel="noopener">The Phoenix and the Carpet</a>). By the internal chronology, the kids are maybe a year and a half older than when the trilogy started, but they haven't matured even a little bit, and Jane, the youngest, seems to have regressed. Or maybe she really is eight and Nesbit finally figured out how eight-year-olds talk and act. (Hint: They're just learning to be rational.) Her fear of going into strange and potentially dangerous societies seems extreme not because she exaggerates the dangers, but because she's handled other crises far more calmly. What I like about this book is the subplot with the learned gentleman, Jimmy, whose association with the children saves him from his isolation and reminds him of what it was like to be a child. Unlike the other adults in the series, Jimmy has no problem playing their "games" and envies their imagination rather than telling them to grow up, even though his belief that it's all a strange dream nearly gets everyone killed when he insists on staying to see the drowning of Atlantis. If I were making a movie of this book, I'd beef up his role to provide more of a connection between the actual time-travel the Amulet allows and the belief in the miraculous that is the heritage of any human being who chooses to take it.