David Blaize and the Blue Door (Esprios Classics): Illustrated by H. J. Ford

David Blaize #2

by E.F. Benson

Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 - 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer. Benson's first book published was Sketches From Marlborough. He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversial Dodo (1893), which was an instant success, and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama. He repeated the success of Dodo, which featured a scathing description of composer and militant suffragette Ethel Smyth (which she "gleefully acknowledged", according to actress Prunella Scales), with the same cast of characters a generation Dodo the Second (1914), "a unique chronicle of the pre-1914 Bright Young Things" and Dodo Wonders (1921), "a first-hand social history of the Great War in Mayfair and the Shires".

Genres: British Literature

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

Edward Frederic "E. F." Benson was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer.

E. F. Benson was the younger brother of A.C. Benson, who wrote the words to "Land of Hope and Glory", Robert Hugh Benson, author of several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson, an author and amateur Egyptologist.

Benson died during 1940 of throat cancer at the University College Hospital, London. He is buried in the cemetery at Rye, East Sussex.

Last paragraph from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Michael Dennis · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the style —somewhat — of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland but much less successfully executed. David goes through the mysterious blue door to a world inhabited by his toys and games and has all sorts of adventures. Surprisingly, considering E.F. Benson’s wit in other works, this book doesn’t have the same charming turns of phrases that I’ve come to expect.

[Bettie]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48505

Opening: Ever since he was four years old, and had begun to think seriously, as a boy should, David Blaize had been aware that there was a real world lying somewhere just below the ordinary old thing in which his father and mother and nurse and the rest of the fast-asleep grown-up people lived. Boys began to get drowsy, he knew, about the time that they were ten, though they might still have occasional waking moments, and soon after that they went sound asleep, and lost all chance of ever seeing the real world. If you asked grown-ups some tremendously important question, such as ‘Why do the leaves fall off the trees when there is glass on the lake?’ as likely as not they would begin talking in their sleep about frost and sap, just as if that had got anything to do with the real reason.

[Lesley]

No, really, it is not that easy to write a children's book, which is what I assume this was intended as. Derivative and dull (also appears to have internal inconsistencies with the other David Blaize novels).