This is the personalised version of E.
Nesbit’s Five Children & It.
Sophie
and Serena go on holiday and decide to dig a hole to Australia. In doing so,
they meet a very strange creature with eyes on stalks and feet like a monkey
who calls himself a Psammead and claims to be able to give wishes. This turns
out to be true…but whoever said you should be careful what you wish for
couldn’t have been more right.
Five Children & It was one of my favourite books when I was growing up, and as I haven’t quite finished growing up yet, I still love the book now. I always wanted to meet the Psammead and have wishes – so, once more, BookByYou has made my dream come true.
A lot of the text had
to be changed in order to set the story in present day America/Canada (which is
a slight shame, as I’m British, but I can see why it was done), but the writer
seems to have changed as little as possible. The language has been updated, so
‘wicked old man’ becomes ‘mean old fart’ (which isn’t the sort of phrase I’d
want my children using), ‘yes’ is often ‘yeah’, and ‘porridge’ becomes
‘oatmeal’. The last seems a particularly appropriate substitution given that
both are disgusting. The children wear jeans rather than pinafores (which means
you can personalise it with two boys, two girls, or one of each), there are no
servants, and the gipsies have been updated into tourists.
I can see why the
book was updated, and it is really interesting to see which bits had to be
changed and which bits still work in the present day. But I am a little bit
disappointed. ClassicBookByYou doesn’t seem to do any updating, and that, for
me, is part of the fun - I really loved being Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Elizabeth in Pride & Prejudice, and I enjoyed saying things like ‘old bean’ and ‘I had not known you a month before I felt that
you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry’.
Calling Tommy ‘babe’ and telling Mr Darcy ‘I’d rather marry a ****ing Chelsea
player’ wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it, somehow.
As always, the book includes named
non-personalised characters, so it’s better not to use the same names for
personalised characters, though only the adult character’s friend Harold features
in more than one wish. There’s also a Zeke, Edgar, Agatha, Percy, Jakin, Elsa and
Harry, and it would be better not to call the adult character Mr Wilson, Mr
Langford, Mrs Rothwell, Lord Wiltshire or Mrs McPotts.
It is a shame there are only two children
in the personalised book. The four older children in the original book, Cyril,
Anthea, Robert and Jane, are brilliant and very distinctive characters, and
their baby brother the Lamb is just adorable. I’d have liked it even more if
I’d been able to put a couple more friends in the story. But as usual, I
thoroughly enjoyed being part of such an enjoyable book and the Psammead is a
great character - though I didn’t realise until I read the personalised version
what a moody old fart he is.
E.
Nesbit’s other Psammead books, The Phoenix and the Carpet and (The Story of)
The Amulet are also available from KidsBookByYou.
