Rereading: WET MAGIC by E Nesbit

Generally I like Nesbit’s novels for children better than her short stories, but this is definitely a lesser work. It starts out in a promising way as a family of four children—Bernard, Kathleen, Mavis, and Francis—are taken on a seaside holiday where they learn that a live mermaid has been captured and is on exhibit at a local circus. With the help of Reuben, an orphan boy working at the circus, they manage to get the mermaid back to the sea and release her. Later she comes when they call her, and invites them all to visit her undersea kingdom, using her magic to make them able to breathe and move underwater.

After that, the story gets bogged down in an undersea war between the Merfolk and their deep-sea enemies, the Under Folk, and most of the rest of the book is focused on that. There are some subplots about lost kings and missing parents that are all resolved by the end, but generally the battles are hard to get involved in, at least for me. Nesbit’s magic solutions pop up whenever things seem hopeless, but lucky coincidence is just as often the answer to a problem. I never felt the characters were in any real danger. There are also some unlikely characters that come out of books, which is an odd choice for an undersea story. Often Nesbit seems to almost forget the watery setting, and offers strange reasons why everything seems pretty much the same as on dry land as it suits her narrative.

Mildly recommended.

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