The Railway Children (1905)

Read mostly because I'd recently read The Boxcar Children and also because I used to love E. Nesbit's fantasy stories and have been trying to remember for a while whether the thing where the elephant? statues come to life? or the children sleep in them? or am I confusing that with Les Miserables somehow? -- whether that was one of hers, or maybe Edward Eager's, and you never know it might have been this one.

It was not this one, which had no statues, hollow, elephant or otherwise, and was a fantasy only to the extent that these children save a frankly incredible number of lives while also remaining persistently oblivious to the social norms they keep crashing through in asking people for help with, variously, the inconveniences of their sudden poverty due to the mysterious disappearance of their father(*), birthday presents for their friend, solving another friend's problems, finding their father, etc.

I do love the turn of phrase "repeating and repeating like a tune that you don't know the stopping part of" which is a neat way of describing an earworm before the term "earworm" was invented.

(*) He was falsely imprisoned. Again fantastically he is vindicated and reunited with his children in the final scene of the book, during which coincidentally my eyes were cruelly assaulted by the fumes of the onion that was sitting in the other room. ( )

Thoughtful

It's hard for me to dislike a Nesbit book(I think Water Magic is the only one I never finished) , so this one was average. Though the kids are fun, the stories are dated. Oddly enough, it could probably have fit into any time between 1840-1960 but, now, you would spend too much time explaining details to make it much fun. Though, I'm highly jealous, as always, of the seemingly limitless amount of unstructured time. ( )

Memorable. ( )

This is a classic children's novel written at the turn of the twentieth century. The story involves a family in which the father was mysteriously taken away leaving the mother and three children to downsize and live a life of more moderate means in a rural area. Near the home is a train track and train station and the kids have several exciting adventures connected in part to that fact, I can see why the novel is loved and believe that even children today would enjoy the book. ( )