I’m of two minds regarding this interesting anthology. The first thought is that it really is quite lovely, and the editor does a splendid job of collecting the old and unusual for the lineup of “stories of mischief, magic, and mayhem.” The second thought is that it’s like eating an entire meal, but only half of each course. It’s enjoyable and delightful, but ultimately unfulfilling. Why’s that, you ask? It’s because, unlike most collections of this sort, Wizards primarily contains excerpts from older works. Not full stories, but a chapter here and a selection there. Of nineteen offerings, all of six have the beginning, middle, and end of a real story. The rest were taken from longer works.
The selections, as well, are somewhat on the esoteric side. The oldest of these are taken from the epic poems of Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney) and The Odyssey (translated by Allen Mandelbaum), with the former detailing Beowulf’s conversation with the dragon, and the latter telling of Odysseus versus the witch Circe. Already we’re off to an interesting start, pulling from such old sources.
Two selections from E. Nesbit, respectively from Five Children and It and The Book of Beasts, bring us closer to the modern day, drawing from what many might consider one of the best and classic writers for young adults in the Victorian era. The first describes how the five children in question disturbed a sand fairy, a Psammead, and gained a wish a day as a result, the first wish coming with unexpected consequences. The second story is one of the few complete tales in this anthology, and shows what happens when a disobedient boy becomes king and opens a book he really should not have, and does so several times. As Jennifer Willis states, Nesbit “wrote some of the world’s best stories about bored children looking for something to do and finding it.”
Certainly, the themes are unmissable, and they carry over to some of the other authors represented in the book, for instance, the selection from C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which the irrepressibly curious Lucy explores a curious old wardrobe and finds a magical land wreathed in eternal winter, ruled over by the dangerous White Queen. There’s a part from Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, where a young boy recovering from measles but suffering from insomnia discovers a world of ghosts, existing only in the hour when the clock strikes an impossible thirteen, late at night. And there’s a portion from George MacDonald’s At The Back of the North Wind, where young Diamond shares bizarre nocturnal adventures with the whimsical, capricious, shapeshifting North Wind herself. Willis even includes the beginning of Edward Eager’s Half Magic, a tale pointedly inspired by E. Nesbit, in which four children run afoul of a coin which can apparently grant wishes, but not entirely as one would expect.
Lewis Carroll is represented, with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, reprinting the sequence in which poor Alice attends a surreal tea party, and comes away none the wiser and a whole lot more confused. Margery Williams’ charming story of The Velveteen Rabbit is included in full, telling the tale of a stuffed rabbit who, like Pinnochio, seeks to one day become Real.
Fairy tales get their due, with the entirety of The Snow Queen, as told by Hans Christian Anderson and adapted by Amy Ehrlich. It’s the story of two friends, and the lengths to which one is forced to go when the dreaded Snow Queen kidnaps the other, who’s been blinded in the eyes and heart by shards of the Devil’s mirror.
T. H. White has not one but two contributions. The first is a full story, “The Troll,” and the second recounts Wart’s first meeting with Merlyn in The Once and Future King. Meanwhile, Russian author Nicholai Gogol’s bizarre story of “The Nose” appears in full, but shoots itself in the foot by not only pointing out all the logical gaps, but going so far as to handwave them away as though they don’t matter. Why call attention to such things, if only to dismiss them?
Mark Helprin’s “A Jew of Persia” rounds out the selections from more mainstream authors, while the beginning pages of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and the opening of Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall finish off offerings from books aimed more at young readers. While there are similarities to be noticed between Wizard’s Hall (written in 1991) and Harry Potter, it would be impossible to mistake one for the other after more than a minute’s reading.
A selection from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin finishes off the straight fantasy selections.
What we have, then, is a diverse collection of excerpts and short stories, all featuring magic (although the piece from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is clearly figurative magic, not literal) and young protagonists (except for the few stories featuring adults instead). Therein lies the problem: this collection doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. Is it all about young adults and children as protagonists? Not entirely. Is it all about real magic and fantasy? Not exactly. Is it representative of a specific time period? The Victorian era, more than any, but with ancient epic poetry and stories written within the past fifteen years, it’s not that either.
Frankly, I really did enjoy this anthology, but at the same time, an inability to label it frustrated me, and the fact that I’ll have to go hunting down another dozen books to find out how many of these stories continue and end also makes it more of a tease than a satisfying book should be. It’s a sampler, and a good one at that, but as a stand-alone it really didn’t hold up well. It’s great for pointing readers towards many other deserving books, but be warned that it doesn’t quite finish what it starts, in terms of what it offers. Decide for yourself whether this one is what you want, or whether you’re better off just seeking out the works of E. Nesbit, T. H. White, Philippa Pierce, Edward Eager, and all the rest on their own.