After a few chapters I put the book down and read other stories in-between but I’m not sure if that helped. The Psammead itself is utilized as a sort of child reader surrogate, starting off totally solipsistic and learning, over the course of the novel, to grow and care more about the humans who are so devastated by the war's progress.

Interestingly, the author makes a very strong attempt at equating the atrocities of the Psammead’s past (which are always told in retrospect and are never seen firsthand) with the atrocities being committed as part of the war. So when the Lamb and Edie find the Psammead anew, the groundwork is there to narrativise the contrast/relationship between childhood and adulthood via these two sets within the sibling group. Confronting issues of class, disillusion, meaningless war, and empathy, the book transcends its source material and is all the better for it.Nowhere in the book do I really find these two ideas of the Edwardian child and the 1910s adult being brought to bear on each other. Starting as a shy young girl, fantasizing over marrying a vet when she’s older and growing up to be a girl arguing over her right to be a doctor with her parents (the suffrage movement was just ending at the time). Why invoke these particular characters and their background of fun, innocent childhood and put them in wartime unless you were interested in how that contrast communicated.

I really liked this book, because it had detail, but just at the right sport not to boor you into a coma, but also has just the right amount of detail that you will have no idea what the storyline of book is. In her afterword, Saunders says, "I saw (Nesbit's characters) as eternal children, frozen for all time in a golden Edwardian summer, like the figures painted on Keats' Grecian urn.

If I didn't know otherwise you could have convinced me this was a recently unearthed manuscript of Nesbit's. The upper-class "jolly-hockey-sticks" quality so imbued in the children's language can jar in moments of pathos, and there's an odd tendency - especially in the Psammead's stories of its own past - for Saunders to show instead of tell. for a new sequel to an old classic series, I hold this one close to my heart something about it just.

Not only in what their future held in relation to the great war but also, to an equal extent, in relation to departing the wonderful age of innocence that Nesbit had let them experience in her own trilogies. Saunders begins her novel with a 1905 prologue in which the Psammead transports Cyril, Robert, Anthea, Jane and the Lamb 25 years into the future. I also liked this book, because I heard that this was a book that was based on the book "Five children and it", by E. It was a surreal and uncanny experience but by the fourth page she had my heart and my trust that she was going to do something special with this story; embracing Nesbit’s style, sense of adventure and, most impressively, the characters’ voices and nature. At the time, I never really noticed that most of her books follow a reliable - even repetitive - pattern (short story mini-adventures of siblings strung out into a novel, often with a grumpy magical creature involved), that her language and attitude is distinctly upper-class, or that they wouldn't really work outside of their own era.The children initially regard the Psammead as a treasured (if rather bad-tempered) sand fairy but as the book progresses we learn about the awful crimes he committed in his time. No lessons, no underlining moral, no didactic tone relating to what children should and should not do. I've never read Five Children and It but I'm familiar with the story from 90s TV series, so I already had hazy memories of the Pembletons and Psammead. One of the characters in this tender, clear-eyed and humorous novel remarks of the years before 1914 that "there were still happy endings in those days".