Night of the New Magicians

The Paris World's Fair of 1889 is where Mary Pope Osborne drops Jack and Annie in Night of the New Magicians, and 7 year olds get a proper puzzle to work out alongside them.

What happens

Merlin's letter is waiting in the tree house. An evil sorcerer is planning to steal the secrets of four new magicians at the fair. Find them first, warn them, and learn their secrets.

The four are described like something out of a fairy tale. The Magician of Sound, whose voice can be heard for a thousand miles. The Magician of Light, whose fires glow but do not burn. The Magician of the Invisible, who battles deadly enemies nobody can see. The Magician of Iron, who bends the metals of earth and triumphs over the wind.

Jack's first reaction is the sensible one. Those sound like people from Camelot, not from real life.

And that is the whole trick of this book. Your reader gets there at about the same speed Jack does, and it's very satisfying when they do.

The first clue is a small girl pressing earpieces to her father's head and squealing that it's magic, because it can send a voice a thousand miles. The sign above the stall says telephone. Alexander Graham Bell has just left, and a stranger in a long dark cloak handed him an invitation on his way out.

Three more to go, worked out the same way, from what people at the fair are marvelling at.

The fair itself is worth the trip. There's a little steam train that carries you past a Japanese garden, a New Year dragon, a globe of the world three storeys high and a statue of Venus made entirely of chocolate. The Eiffel Tower is brand new and everyone is staring up at it.

Osborne gives Jack a guide book instead of a research book this time, so the facts come in through what a Victorian tourist would have been told. It's a nice change if your reader has done a run of these.

There isn't much here to make a child anxious. The sorcerer is a hood, a whispery voice and a chill down Jack's spine, and he stays offstage for a long while. The tower climb and the storm at the door are more exciting than frightening.

The one thing to flag is that this sits well into the Merlin Missions, so Teddy and Kathleen's rhyme book, the Camelot business and two earlier trips are all assumed knowledge. A child who has only read the early Magic Tree House books will follow the story perfectly well but will miss a few nods.

What to read next

Season of the Sandstorms is the trip that comes just before this one, and it's in the library. Jack and Annie go to a desert in the Middle East, meet a Bedouin tribe, ride camels and get caught in the kind of sandstorm the title promises.