The Adventures of the Wishing Chair

Product Information

This book will provide you a dose of healthy nostalgia and remind most fans about the joys of earlier generations and the books. Enid Blyton is a legend and a brilliant story writer. Over the course of the books they travel to all kinds of weird and wonderful places — the Land of Dreams, the Village of Slipperies, Mister Grim's School for Bad Brownies, the Land of Goodies and many others, meeting characters like the Grabbit Gnomes, Witch Kirri-Kirri, the Snoogle, Mr. Spells and Winks the brownie. Enid Blyton used some of the same lands in her Faraway Tree series. Blyton was a prolific author of children's books, who penned an estimated 800 books over about 40 years. Her stories were often either children's adventure and mystery stories, or fantasies involving magic. Notable series include: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, Noddy, The Wishing Chair, Mallory Towers, and St. Clare's. The first book, Adventures of the Wishing-Chair, has the distinction of being Enid Blyton's first full-length novel — although it is episodic in nature. A TV series was made in 1998 as part of Enid Blytons Enchanted Lands.

Despite the very short chapters i rarely made it through one fully engaged. The flatness of the characters and mediocrity of the writing making it so hard to care. Literary beige. Do you want distinct characters, rich descriptive writing, emotional involvement and that mix of the fantastic and grounded that makes a story feel truly magical? Then you should look elsewhere because this book has NONE of that :P . The book version of a straight to dvd disney film. As mentally stimulating as an 'Adam Sandler' movie. Narrative horse-tranquilizer. Whenever you start to enjoy it you can actually feel a few more braincells commit hari-kari. Everytime someone praises this book a fairy dies...wait..wait.. i'm sure i've got a few more ;)...Peter and Mollie arrive home from school where Chinky joins up with them and they're ready for more adventures. On their first visitation to a strange land they meet Chinky's cousin "Sleep-Alone." He's a rather anti-social type who just wishes to get away from everyone and everything so that he can have a decent sleep but, unfortunately, he's always disturbed no matter where he is and Peter, Mollie and Chinky play their part in his interrupted life. The adventure moves on and a problem arises when their wonderful chair is stolen so naturally there's an all-out hunt for it and this is where they become involved with Mr. Spells — an Enchanter. After a rather unpleasant introduction they eventually make friends with him and later on in the book Mollie and Peter seem able to visit Mr. Spells whenever they like which is a little unusual because when entering magical places there's generally a need to be accompanied by one of the in-folk such as a fairy or pixie. This appears to have been written earlier than the Faraway Tree series and Blyton's style in this book seems to be quite different as well. Where the Faraway Tree had stories that covered multiple chapters the Wishing Chair has about one adventure per chapter with the exception of two, one takes up two chapters and the grand finale takes up three. Also, where the adult world occasionally intruded into the world of the Faraway Tree, in that the fairies would come and visit the children in their home, this does not happen in the world of the Wishing Chair. A couple of the adventures do involve the adult world intruding, but they only involved an incident when the Wishing Chair was going to be sold, where it was then moved into the house, and the other one involved a missing ring. However, pretty much most of the adventures occur in the play room, and the faerie realm, which appears to be an extension of the play room.

According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare.

Wishing-Chair

Sometimes I do wish I had access to a wishing chair which could whip up some adventures in a whiff.... Ha Ha... The Wishing-Chair Again came out in 1950 after it was serialised in the Sunny Stories magazine about a year earlier. That's over ten years after the first book ( Adventures of the Wishing Chair) was published.

Throughout childhood I had the recurring image of a wonderful Titbit Dish. Every time you lift the lid there is a titbit there — a sausage, a bar of chocolate, an orange or even an ice-cream. Like all children I could never get as many sweets and goodies that I required and I used to think about that little dish which Peter owned. What a wonderful possession it would be — then at the end of this book he gives it away to a naughty brownie. What a waste of such a desirable item! An animated series, Enid Blyton's Enchanted Lands, based on stories from The Wishing Chair and The Faraway Tree series was broadcast in 1997 and 1998. A selection of episodes, "The Ho Ho Wizard", "The Grabbit Gnomes", "Poor Lost Jigs", "The Land of Dreams", "The Disappearing Islands", "The Magician's Party" and "The Chair Clowns About" were later released on VHS and DVD. The complete series was later released on VHS in 1999 on 2 separate tapes with 6 other episodes added which included: "The Invisible Chair", "The Great Escape", "The Snoogle", "The Slipperies", "The Land of Goodies" and "Mr Spells and the Wandering Castle". The voice cast were: Richard Pearce, Julia Harrison-Jones, Mark Channon, Nigel Pelgram, Adrienne Posta and David Holt. Later copies of Adventures of the Wishing-Chair were abridged then in further editions some chapters were restored and some left out so if you want to read them all try searching for The Wishing Chair Collection or More Wishing-Chair Tales and add them to your reprints — although you may not end up with all the Hilda McGavin illustrations.Minor editorial amendments have been made to the books over the years to bring text in line with the editorial standards above, including changing the name of the main pixie character to Binky in 2018. Hilda McGavin is once again the talented illustrator. Her efforts seem a little different from the more defined pictures that decorate the first book. The children are a little older or bigger-looking of course but the illustrations overall seem a weeny bit less-detailed than in the previous volume. Not all that noticeable though. I think that Adventures of the Wishing-Chair is an exceptionally good item to produce when a child wishes to read his or her very first book however if the young person is of a very nervous disposition and prone to nightmares then it might be wise to think about chapters such as those where the children enter a witch's garden at the dead of night or when they are captured in a castle belonging to an outlandish creature.