Seven-Day Magic
core novel 1962 Tales of Magic
Record
| First published | 1962 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.13 (5,043 ratings, collected 2026-10-06) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780152020798 |
| Internal chronology | 7 |
Synopsis
Walking home from the library, five children, Barnaby, John, Susan, Abbie and Fredericka, discover that the tattered red book one of them has checked out is about themselves: it describes everything they have done that day, up to the moment Susan opened it. The book is magic, due back in seven days, and it will carry them wherever they wish, which, for children raised on Oz and Nesbit and Eager's own earlier books, means into stories: they meet a dragon, a wizard, a character out of Half Magic and a pioneer family on the prairie, while the book goes on writing down everything that happens to them as it happens. Along the way the magic reaches into their own lives, and their father's stalled career as a television singer. Eager's last and most deliberately literary novel, the only one whose children appear in no other book.
Where it sits
- Universe: Tales of Magic
- Series: Tales of Magic core; position 7 of 7 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Edward Eager
Notes
- From the series record (Tales of Magic): Edward Eager's seven novels of magic breaking into the lives of ordinary American children, written in open homage to E. Nesbit: two linked pairs (Half Magic and Magic by the Lake; Knight's Castle and The Time Garden, whose children are the first pair's children and cousins), two about a possibly magic wishing well, and Seven-Day Magic, in which the children meet characters from the earlier books.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Tales of Magic: position 7 of 7: previous The Well-Wishers (1960)
Sources
← Tales of Magic dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.