Word: magical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nothing is more boring and embarrassing than an amateur conjurer. Magic must be perfect; real rabbits must emerge from the trick hat. The reader, noting that Sylvia Ashton-Warner's novel is dedicated to a river (New Zealand's Whanganui), that among the chief characters are 13 darling children, most of them under one tin roof, and that various Maori gods and spirits are freely invoked, may suspect that he is being conjured into accepting a crock of anthropological whimsy. Not so; the magic here is real...
...book is written in the present tense, an irritating literary affectation as a rule. Here the device becomes a knob opening a door to the trancelike continuum of childhood-particularly that of the magic child Huia, with her ancestral talisman, a carved greenstone, and the grace of an imagination that has been touched by the best in two worlds. Sylvia Ashton-Warner does other things easily that most current writers would not attempt to contrive. Huia watches a fight between a brown-skin Maori and a white boy. They are not fighting for status, or out of racial bitterness...
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship...
Yale was outplayed, and seemed to win the game by magic. The Crimson forwards swung away with the abandon of batting practice, and if you totalled the square feet of open cage Harvard shot at, you would have a very broad side of a barn...
...kiss. I saw tongues"). Jews, of course, have no priority on black humor. One of its darkest stars, Terry Southern, a Texas gentile, has been operating successfully in the black for years with ham-handed satires on pornography (Candy), nuclear war (Dr. Strangelove) and money and morality (The Magic Christian...