Review written for ClubReading.com by Susan

Siblings Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha are bored. It’s summer in 1920s Toledo, Ohio, their widowed mother works all day, and they can’t afford to go to the beach. Then Jane finds a magic coin on the sidewalk that grants wishes but only in halves. “Wah oo merglitz fitzahhh!” says the cat, after Martha wishes it could talk. When the children figure out what the coin can do, they plunge into a series of escapades involving knights in (partly) shining armor, the Sahara desert, much chaos, and eventual new happiness. Eager’s sure touch never falters, and the world as it was before TV and computers is as magical as the wishes granted by the mysterious coin. This is the first, and most enjoyable, in a set of children’s books by Eager involving magic, time-travel, and the unexpected consequences of both. Adult readers need not be accompanied by a minor.

EXCERPT FROM Half Magic:

“Ha ha!” [the strange lady] cried, “Now they will take [Lancelot] to my castle, where he will lies in a deep dungeon and be beaten every day with thorns! And so we shall serve all knights of the Round Table who happen this way! Death to King Arthur!”

“Why, you false thing, you!” said Jane. “I told him so!” said Katharine. “Let’s go home!” said Martha. “No, we have to rescue him!” said Mark.

“Ho ho!” said the lady. “Just you try it! Your magic is a mere nothing compared with mine, elfspawn! Know that I am the great enchantress, Morgan le Fay!”

“You would be!” said Katharine, who didn’t like being called “elfspawn,” as who would? “I remember you in the books, always making trouble. I wish you’d go jump in the lake!”

Katharine wasn’t thinking of the charm when she wished this, or she might have worded it differently. But that didn’t stop the charm.

“Good old charm!” said Mark, as he watched what happened." Morgan le Fay didn’t go jump in the lake; she merely fell in a pool. Luckily there was a pool handy. She slid backwards off her horse and landed in it in a sitting position. And luckier still, the pool had a muddy bottom, and Morgan le Fay stuck there long enough for Katharine to make another, calmer wish, which was that she would stay stuck, and unable to use any of her magic, for twice as log as woud be necessary.

This done, the four children turned their horses into the wood, and set about following the wicked knights. Morgan le Fay hurled a few curses after them from among the water weeds, but these soon died away in the distance.

There was no path to follow through the wood. The branches of trees hung low and thick, and the earth beneath them was damp and dark and dank, and no birds sang.

“This,” said Katharine, “is what I would call a tulgey wood.”

“Don’t!” cried Martha. “Suppose something came whiffling through it!”