The Story of the Amulet (version 3 dramatic reading)

Well-read; middling for Nesbit

Stephen

This is on the whole a well-read book; Cyril was the only character whose voicing disappointed me, and he wasn’t awful. The important thing, of course, with this series is to have a good Anthea, and I was quite satisfied with her. The book was only fair. In her later books E. Nesbit seems to lose some of her particular charm, valuing pretty things, or fanciful ones, or even moralistic bits over the child dialogue she does so well. It isn’t so bad here (certainly far better than ‘The Magic City’ or ‘Wet Magic’), perhaps because she has to keep up the characterization from the previous two books, but things are starting to lean in that direction. It is undoubtedly at its worst when the children visit a future socialist utopia and are edified by littering laws, E. Nesbit‘s own ideas about education, and the apparent canonization of H.G. Wells (as a social thinker, not an entertaining writer). On the whole, worth hearing, but with some tedious points.