The Enchanted Castle: Volume 34 (Children's Classics)

Classics for Your Collection:

goo.gl/U80LCr

---------

The story concerns three children, two brothers (Gerald and Jimmy), and their sister, Cathy. They are on holiday, away from their parents (don't all the best adventures happen on these types of occasions?), and staying in Cathy's boarding school under the supervision of the French schoolmistress, who sits around looking wistful.

To break the monotony of the boarding house, they decide to explore the local countryside and get hopelessly lost. They come across a hole in a hedge which leads to an underground passage, which itself leads them into a beautiful garden with an ornate castle at its centre.

The garden is seemingly deserted, and the feeling of magic grows as they come to the entrance of a maze. Following a scarlet thread, which brings them to the maze's epicentre, they discover a sleeping princess, who Jimmy wakes up with a smacker on her cheek.

After providing a feast for them in the castle (bread and cheese) the princess turns out not to be a princess after all, but a girl named Mabel. Nonetheless, she does possess a magic ring...

'The Enchanted Castle' is a very episodic, with the children having different adventures in each chapter. What joins the chapters together to a unified whole is the enchanted ring. Through its powers, they can become invisible and make wishes.

They help the local policeman catch a burglar, make the statues in the garden come alive, and help the French schoolteacher find her long lost love. The wishes they make also quite naturally get them into all sorts of scrapes, including getting the ring stuck on their finger, growing too tall in 'Alice in Wonderland' style, and making inanimate objects come alive into 'Uglie-Wuglies', more terrifying than it sounds.

Throughout all this, Nesbit writes in her typically relaxed, natural style, and her characters, while not well-rounded, talk and act like real children. It is this inherent realism that makes the magical elements seem so real.

The Enchanted Castle was written for both children and adults.

Facts and Trivia:

The Enchanted Castle was adapted into a TV-miniseries by the BBC in 1979. It has not been released on DVD or VHS in the UK, however, a DVD was released in Australia on 03/07/2013.

Scroll Up and Grab Your Copy!

Also by E. Nesbit

The Railway Children https://www.createspace.com/6483012

Five Children and It https://www.createspace.com/6358326

Oz Books

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6426287

TIK-TOK of OZ https://www.createspace.com/6353841

Ozma of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6356346

Glinda of OZ https://www.createspace.com/6461890

The Scarecrow of OZ https://www.createspace.com/6461981

The Marvelous Land of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6462832

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz https://www.createspace.com/6464450

The Road to Oz by https://www.createspace.com/6464521

The Emerald City of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6464602

The Patchwork Girl of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6464682

The Lost Princess of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6465342

The Tin Woodman of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6466582

Rinkitink in Oz https://www.createspace.com/6464764

The Magic of Oz https://www.createspace.com/6466620

Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm https://www.createspace.com/6440051

Sky Island by L. Frank Baum https://www.createspace.com/6446563

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett https://www.createspace.com/6455917

Edith Nesbit (married name Edith Bland; 15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924) was an English author and poet; she published her books for children under the name of E. Nesbit.

She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 books of fiction for children.

Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, including novels, collections of stories and picture books. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.

According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was "the first modern writer for children": "(Nesbit) helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels." Briggs also credits Nesbit with having invented the children's adventure story. Noël Coward was a great admirer of hers and, in a letter to an early biographer Noel Streatfeild, wrote "she had an economy of phrase, and an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days in the English countryside."