Philip Haldane’s parents are both dead, so Philip, who is ten, has been raised by his older half-sister, Helen. She’s the only family he’s had or wanted, and has always been a kind and caring (and fun!) parent. But now she’s getting married to her childhood sweetheart, whose first wife died, and Philip is none too pleased about the situation. He’s so upset by the upheaval that he’s nasty to his new stepsister and everyone in his new home, though Lucy, his stepsister, is excited finally to have a sibling she can play with. But he’s so mean that Lucy’s aunt sweeps her off for a holiday, and of course Helen is off on her honeymoon, leaving Philip in a new place with no one but the servants, including Lucy’s nurse, who is not at all nice. But things pick up when the nurse leaves and Philip has the run of the house (which is a very nice house). He amuses himself by building a fantastic city out of blocks and books and other household things: Nesbit describes the building process really pleasingly, in passages like this:
So the next day Philip went on with his building. He put everything you can think of into it: the dominoes and the domino box, bricks and books, cotton reels that he begged from Susan, and a collar box and some cake tins contributed by the cook. He made steps of the dominoes and a terrace of the domino box. He got bits of southernwood out of the garden and stuck them in cotton reels, which made beautiful pots, and they looked like bay trees in tubs. Brass finger bowls served for domes, and the lids of brass kettles and coffeepots from the oak dresser in the hall made minarets of dazzling splendor. (12)
And then, by magic, Philip finds himself inside the city he’s made, which is peopled by the wooden figures and animals he’s placed in it, plus other people and things that have come out of the books he’s used. Lucy, newly home from her holiday, manages to tag along, and the two have adventures and become friends, while completing seven difficult tasks and thereby protecting the land-of-the-cities from a mysterious figure known as the Destroyer or the Pretenderette.. This isn’t my favorite of Nesbit’s books, but I did enjoy it, especially the passages about Philip and the cities and places he and Helen have built and imagined. I like Nesbit’s reminders to her readers that girls are (or can be) just as clever and brave as boys, and while her other lessons (slothfulness is bad, greed is bad, producing nothing but money is bad, the eight-hour workday is good) are told a bit too didactically, there’s still a lot to enjoy here.
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