She emerges in a new home of horrible gentility, trotting through piano practice in a cold, grey house with cold, grey parents.
Back in Ohio, a semi-transparent Martha causes mass panic about a Martian invasion, and Jane furiously makes the worst wish of all - to belong to another family ("I wish it twice!"). Long ago and far away are rousing but home is where the real dilemmas simmer. Provoked, she conjures virtuoso jousting skills and humiliates him at Camelot. She rescues Sir Launcelot (ungrateful and, as I always suspected, overrated), but is piqued by his arrogance and resents being called "churl" or "elfspawn". Katherine spirits everyone to Arthurian England, bent on good deeds. "You just got half a wish," says his elder sister.
Mark longs to be on a desert island, and suddenly there's hot sand in every direction. Eager chronicles the gradual steps to comprehending the charm's powers, such as magicking the cat into petulant half-speech ("Idlwidl bixbax. "What would twice as much as never having to learn fractions be," a bemused Martha grumbles. The charm, worn thin by time, halves desires in unpredictable ways, and demands a variety of complicated sums. Jane notices a coin glinting in a crack in the pavement only when she ill-temperedly wishes a fire would relieve the summer boredom and immediately hears emergency sirens (it's just a half-fire, in a spoilt child's playhouse), does she suspect the coin's remarkable qualities. Arms crammed to the borrowing limit, they pause on strangers' front steps to read from their books, thirsting for adventure. I always loved the opening, full of routine and promise, as the children wander home from the library.
They are bracingly sharp and stubborn: Jane (oldest and bossiest), Mark (only boy), romantic bookworm Katherine and persistent little Martha. Four children are left to their own devices - their father is dead, their mother drudges on a local paper. We're in middle America during a long hot summer.
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