This is the second book of the trilogy that begins with Five Children and It<\/i>, and this one is my favorite. The children find an egg wrapped inside a cheap carpet that their mother’s bought, and the egg turns out to be a phoenix, and the carpet turns out to be a magic carpet. Adventures ensue, of course: escapes from November-gloomy London, travels to France and India and a tropical island. This book feels more funny and clever than the first one, perhaps because Nesbit lets magic infiltrate the adult world without always having negative consequences: there’s a great episode in the offices of a fire-insurance company, and also an entertaining bit with a burglar. Also wonderful: the paperback Puffin Classics edition I read uses the original illustrations by H.R. Millar, and they’re perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the second book of the trilogy that begins with Five Children and It, and this one is my favorite. The children find an egg wrapped inside a cheap carpet that their mother’s bought, and the egg turns out to be a phoenix, and the carpet turns out to be a magic carpet. Adventures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}