Five Children and It
by Edith Nesbit · first published 1905
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Haven't you ever thought what you would wish for if you were granted three wishes? In Nesbit's delightful classic, five siblings find a creature that grants their wishes, but as the old saying goes: be careful what you wish for, it might come true...
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…have expired, so they’re also available now as open‐source, public domain ebooks at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-nesbit I was a big fan of Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy as a child: Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet.
on “E. Nesbit used grief, politics, imagination to make a new kind of book for kids” ↗I don’t have hard evidence, but when I was a kid I enjoyed the children’s book ‘Five children and it’, written ~1900 The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.
on “Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests” ↗…and therefore blatantly incorrect as a he/she replacement, whereas it was singular and gender-less (though gender-less != gender-neutral (at least, not necessarily)). Anyone that's read E. Nesbit's The Five Children and It (the 'It' in the title is completely unrelated, as it refers to a mythical being and not any human) would have experienced this oddity of the English language, and <strike>they</strike>…
on “How should a startup founder value her time?” ↗> the homepage really does say "hello i am maia arson crimew (it/she)". > I'd feel uncomfortable referring to anyone as "it" though In Five Children and It (published in 1902), the "It" of the title is a magical creature. However, one of the characters is a human baby who is always referred to with the pronoun "it". I glossed right over that reading the…
on “how to completely own an airline in 3 easy steps” ↗