Customer Reviews

The Wouldbegoods (Puffin Classics - the Essential Collection)

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I wish Oswald were real, I honestly do. He's the greatest, so utterly pompous yet compassionate and humane, so three-dimensional, so all-knowing, yet so childishly naive. The Wouldbegoods is hilarious and quite informative. I learned a great deal about British vocabulary--"ripping" is now my most-loved word.

"I do believe we are the worst children who ever lived!" Alice Bastable cries when yet another plan of the 'Wouldbegoods' goes disastrously wrong. Her despair is understandable, in their attempts to perform good deeds the six Bastable children and their two friends wreck havoc across the British countryside. Yet in the end they do manage to do good, quite by accident. Absolutely hilarious.

6 Bastables and two friends are sent to the country for the summer, and try to do good things. Of course, the best laid plans...But what child can resist a story of children living in a moat house, spending their summer free to explore the English countryside? What great ideas will the children come up with next? The characters are funny and very real. There is trouble around every bend, but a theme of honesty and integrity runs through the story like a breath of fresh country air.

E. Nesbit wrote three books about the Bastables: The Story Of The Treasure Seekers, in which the six Bastable kids look for treasure to restore treir family's fallen fortunes, New Treasure Seekers, a beautiful collection of wonderful Bastable adventures, and the Wouldbegoods, in which the motley troop goes on vacation with their cousins, form the soceity of Wouldbegoods, (in which the motive is to do one good deed a day) and fail miserably. The first thing Noel does is climb the chimney and fetch down a few bricks, a bird nest and a couple tons of soot. Wouldbegoods is by far the best, but if tou want to read it free go to Google.com, type in New Treasure Seekers, click on first choice and you can red either New Treasure Seekers or Wouldbegoods at your leisure.

Everything I've ready by E. Nesbit has been entertaining; the Psammead kids and the Railway Children are believable children and nice, even though they all get into stupid scrapes a lot. They seem to learn from their mistakes. But the Bastables, in the Treasure Seekers and Wouldbegoods, are either sickly-sweet dogooders (Dora and Daisy) or kids who just don't think, and don't seem to learn anything (the rest of them). They get into scrape after scrape - unlike Nesbit's other children who have some legitimate good times - and then the Bastables get sent to bed and that's the end of it, until they do something dumb the next day. Also, this book is purportedly penned by one of the Bastable children and so there is a lot of liberty taken with grammar, history, etc. The other Nesbit books I like are all written in third person and seem easier to read.