The middle book of the Bastable Children’s trilogy once again proves Edith Nesbit to be a world-class humorist with a special touch for depicting the way children speak, feel, and behave. Another set of summer-holiday misadventures proves so side-splittingly funny, it’s like discovering the British Mark Twain. And though there is no actual magic going on, as in so many of Nesbit’s beloved books, the children make amazing things happen with their imaginations, their sense of play, and their extraordinary talent for getting into trouble.

Having been sent away to Albert’s uncle’s house in the country, to get them away from the Blackheath mansion of their “Indian uncle” after a particularly disastrous game of Jungle Book, the six Bastable children find all kinds of wild and woolly things to do in the Kentish farm country. Dora, Oswald, Dicky, Alice, Noël, and H. O. are joined by Denny and Daisy Foulkes, the children of their father’s business associate. They create and join the “Society of Wouldbegoods” which hopes to shape up their character by doing good deeds. But their childish outlooks, and their perverse inability to “mind their own business,” leads them into situations which makes them out to naughtier than normal!

What good works do the Wouldbegoods try? They try to erect a tombstone to memorialise a neighbour-lady’s son, shot down on a faraway battlefield. They fall prey to a scoundrel who locks them in a tower and demands money of them. They wreak havoc on the waterways by tampering with a river lock, damming a river (while playing at being beavers), and trying to control an indoors flood. They “adopt” a baby seemingly lost or abandoned. They get in trouble over a dead fox, a soft drink stand, and (my favourite chapter) an attempt to have a circus using untrained farm animals as talent. There’s also a silly military adventure, a make-believe pilgrimage, and a bit of romantic matchmaking to round off the summer.

With so many children to keep track of, it would be easy to lose sight of some of them and not be able to tell them apart– but not in Nesbit’s hands. Each of the eight children stands out in his or her own way, and they are all lovably silly and at the same time admirable. They take on ridiculous airs– especially Oswald, our narrator– but they also aspire to a nobility of character, and in their cracked way they achieve it. They are vulnerable, yet full of fun and bursting with ideas. When their escaped “learned pig” leads them into the middle of a missionary society’s tea party, a little girl who lives in the house speaks for me (and, I think, nearly anyone else who would read this book)– I do wish I could play like that, though perhaps it is better heard about than done!

10% of the profit from the sale of this book will be donated to charities by the Publisher,
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