Cyril, known as Squirrel: the eldest sibling, who is brave, diplomatic, and book-smart (very intelligent) Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders is a deeply old-fashioned novel. It is quite brilliant as a result, and was one of my favourite reads in the year it was published. It seems to me this book by Kate Saunders was deliberately written in a style similar to that of Nesbit’s original story, so maybe it helps to have read that original. However I still enjoyed it. The writing style made it easy to go along with the flow of the story. Some scenes like the museum trip are lively and other scenes very emotive especially towards the end. A story that is both homage to a classic story, E Nesbit’s Five Children and It, and a moving portrayal of how the first world war changed the lives of one family.

Jones, Raymond E., ed. (2006). E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy: A Children's Classic at 100. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5401-7. One expects a book containing fairies to be filled with magic and wonder; much like the original, except in this one, the fairy has lost his magic. All because the author made him into some kind of tyrannical God who not only kept slaves, but killed many of them. He is still obnoxious, selfish and full of self importance, which leads to a lot of humour but it is somewhat lost when the story unfolds of how cruel he used to be. The losing of his power was seen as punishment until he learnt to be remorseful for his actions. Jane, known as Pussy: a generally agreeable little girl with a tendency to be oversensitive, she is sometimes weepy and easily frightened.It is through Edie, Saunders’ addition to the Pemberton’s, that we experience much of the story. Although the Lamb also starts off young, it is Edie’s youthfulness and joy in the extraordinary that keeps the bond between fantasy and reality strong. With the other children growing up and less interested in their old friend, especially since he isn’t quite what he used to be, the exploring and adventures are left to the two youngest. But adventures with the psammead and no longer the same: there has been a change. Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry. First sentence: The sand at the bottom of the gravel pit shifted and heaved, and out popped the furry brown head of a most extraordinary creature. Somehow in my reading life, I never read E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, so this was my first introduction to the Pemberton family and Psammead, the sand fairy. The time is at the start of World War 1 and Cyril, the eldest of the Pemberton boys is off to fight. Since the last time the five Pembertons, Anthea, Cyril, Robert, Jane and the Lamb saw the Sand Fairy ten years ago, there has been an addition to the family, Edie. Edie is nine and others in the family are grown up and at uni or art school and off to war. The Psammead is a cranky curmudgeon who has lost control of his magic powers. Only some wishes eventuate since his magic is dicey at best these days and cannot be relied upon. This book also reveals a lot about the Psammead’s unsavoury past and heartless attitudes. He is hard to like and I found this coloured my view of the book a little.it

Hilary! Growing from a baby who basically does nothing into an imaginative young boy who loves to explore. He may be the most adventurous character in the whole book. If I hadn’t read Five Children and It or maybe read it a long time ago so it wasn’t fresh in my mind I think I would have loved this book. a b Clute, John (15 October 2021). "Nesbit, E". In Clute, John; Langford, David (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (4thed.). I'm almost certainly being too harsh and should give four stars. Maybe my experience just suffered from high expectations due to the acclaim this book has received. The story is linked in with the war and shows how the young were the ones who sacrificed most of their lives, and although in the novel serious things happened, I missed and felt somewhat cheated at not reading about the character getting up to any mischief with their wishes... No flying (until at the very end, and only a very little bit is included) -it was all rather serious and dull. Which brings me next to the language.The other approach would be to take these children more as symbolic of a generation, to use the iconic nature of these characters to serve as avatars of a generation, heightening the experience of a generation into this idea of four carefree moppets plunged into the worst ind of adult reality. Mark J. Docherty, Alistair D. McGown, The Hill and Beyond: Children's Television Drama - An Encyclopedia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), p. 102 Saunders strikes a surprisingly successful balance between the mischievous magic of the sand fairy and the harsh realities of wartime England.” — The Bulletin In 2004 a film version was released, starring Freddie Highmore, Tara FitzGerald, Jonathan Bailey, Zoë Wanamaker and Kenneth Branagh, with Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.

One would be to be interested in what these particular characters informed by their particular histories would experience within the wider context of WWI? How might the morals implicit and explicit to Nesbit's stories emerge tested against the darker context of WWI? Nesbit wrote two sequels to Five Children and It, one in 1904 called The Phoenix and the Carpet and one in 1906 called The Story of the Amulet. Though they featured the brothers and sisters, it is only in the 1906 novel that the Psammead is again featured.The story is about war. It is set in WWI, and is about five children and some sort of creature, which was described as a "Senior San fairy", and he can grant wishes. For example, there is no tension made felt in the relationship between the states of childhood and adulthood in this book. There is ample opportunity for that to be played with in the central fantasy: in Nesbit's own Psammead mythology, only children can see and believe in the Psammead, not adults (except in exceptional cases like the Professor's which is an exception that in itself helps us to understand what is being framed as the major difference between most children and most adults). An astute critic who still reviewed for the Times and the Jewish Chronicle, she was unstinting in her support for authors she esteemed, and never bitter at her fate. She became increasingly dependent on her youngest sister, Charlotte, who looked after all practical needs so that Kate could continue to produce a book every two years. One of my last memories of her was discussing Jane Austen’s Mrs Smith, Anne Elliot’s disabled and impoverished friend in Persuasion, whom she closely resembled.

Kate Saunders' Five Children on the Western Front is both an homage and a goodbye to this twilight time. It is actually inaccurately named; it should be Six Children on the Western Front, with the addition to Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and the Lamb of a new sibling, Edie. This time, it is Edie and the Lamb who discover the family's old acquaintance, the Psammead, who has lost all of its magic abilities and is trapped in 1914. Why - and what they do about it - is, at least, one of the major strands of the novel, although possibly the least effective. From Cyril’s first letter from the front, I felt a deep sense of foreboding and uncertainty for the children and their fairy friend: I felt that they and the story sat poised a knife-edge of great change. Not only in what their future held in relation to the great war but also, to an equal extent, in relation to departing the wonderful age of innocence that Nesbit had let them experience in her own trilogies. My favourite aspect of the book was the Psammead. In the original, he is a funny, grumpy sand fairy. An original interpretation, that as a child, I enjoyed. I never read the books but loved the television series. However, even I could see that this new adaptation had issues. The word "Psammead", pronounced "sammyadd" by the children in the story, appears to be a coinage by Nesbit from the Greek ψάμμος "sand" after the pattern of dryad, naiad and oread, implicitly signifying "sand-nymph". However, its hideous appearance is unlike traditional Greek nymphs, who generally resemble beautiful maidens.Although Kate Saunders' novel takes its inspiration from E Nesbit's Five Children and It, Five Children on the Western Front is an entirely stand alone novel and there is no need to have read the original classic. Anytime someone writes a new prequel or sequel to an old children’s literary classic, the first question you have to ask is, “Was this necessary?” And nine times out of ten, the answer is a resounding no. No, we need no further adventures in the 100-Acre Woods. No, there’s very little reason to speculate on precisely what happened to Anne before she got to Green Gables. But once in a while an author gets it right. If they’re good they’ll offer food for thought, as when Jacqueline Kelly wrote, Return to the Willows (the sequel to The Wind in the Willows) and Geraldine McCaughrean wrote Peter Pan in Scarlet. And if they’re particularly talented, then they’ll do the series one better. They’ll go and make it smart and pertinent and real and wonderful. They may even improve upon the original. The idea that someone would write a sequel to Five Children and It (and to a lesser extent The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet) is well-nigh short of ridiculous. I mean, you could do it, sure, but why? What’s the point? Well, as author Kate Saunders says of Nesbit’s classic, “Bookish nerd that I was, it didn’t take me long to work out that two of E. Nesbit’s fictional boys were of exactly the right ages to end up being killed in the trenches…” The trenches of WWI, that is. Suddenly we’ve an author who dares to meld the light-hearted fantasy of Nesbit’s classic with the sheer gut-wrenching horror of The War to End All Wars. The crazy thing is, she not only pulls it off but she creates a great novel in the process. One that deserves to be shelved alongside Nesbit’s original for all time. Shortlisted for the 2015 Guardian Children's Book prize - One of our Books of the Year 2014 - October 2014 Book of the Month - Winner of the Costa Children's Book Award 2014 Something has happened to the psammead and it is for the Edie and the others to unravel the reasoning as to why he does not have the power he once wielded. The dawn of a Great War is occurring throughout Europe and such events stir unwelcome memories from the sand-fairy’s past. It is from this point in that I found that tonally, this is not a Nesbit story: it’s Saunders’ and what she does with these characters in a dark and unsettling situation is deeply clever and touching.