The house was in an uproar. A very angry Jennifer Wynd was chasing her younger brother Perry around the living room. She was terribly quick, but then so was Perry, prompted by the little balls of fire Jennifer was throwing at his heels.

Magic runs in the Wynd family, but Professor Wynd and his five kids live quietly - well, mostly quietly - in a small town in Massachusetts. Nine-year-old Perry's biggest problem is that he's been cast as King Arthur in the school play, while his nemesis Nancy is playing Guinevere. Until the kids' illusions start going wrong, some tiny porcelain gargoyles attack, and a bunch of dragons invade the town. Wynds to the rescue!

A short, delightful children's fantasy which I fondly recalled from childhood. It's now on Kindle and is exactly as charming as I remembered. Also, it cracks me up that of the two Stephen Krensky books I've read, both involve a boy desperate to get out of the school play. As I also once desperately tried to get out a school play, I sympathize.

THE DRAGON CIRCLE: 1 The Wynd Family Chronicles

A charming fantasy about a boy whose eccentric grandfather turns out to be a wizard. When Sam’s grandfather gets accidentally sucked into another dimension, he turns to his cousin Sarah for help. Not because she knows anything about magic—her ambition is to become the first woman locomotive driver—but because she’s the most practical and determined person he knows.

She was afraid of only three things in the world: firstly, that many other girls would beat her to it, and secondly, that when she was grown up there wouldn’t be any more railroads, and lastly, of spiders.

Sarah scorns Sam’s protests that he has no magic talent himself. The next thing he knows, he’s studying to be a wizard with her help, and both of them are evading concerned parents, nosy landlords, and an extremely annoying boy named Wendell who finds out their secret and blackmails them over it.

This book unexpectedly has one of the most realistic-feeling depictions of someone learning magic that I’ve read. It involves a lot of actual studying, and an extremely cool scene in which Sam uses a passage from The Wind in the Willows to practice visualization of written description. It also has an unexpected “TV is bad” message. But mostly it’s just a lot of fun. The annoying Wendell gets turned into a TV set (and then end up even more annoying as it can’t be turned off), adults are helpful in the ways that only adults can be in stuff like telling other adults to go away, and a spider-alien who throws on a bathrobe to do a quick impersonation of a human is appalled to then have to maintain it for a game of gin rummy.

Also, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine is a book that exists in this world.

Magic Grandfather