A family of brothers and sisters and the urchin they befriend encounter a mermaid who brings them to a magical underwater kingdom. My favorite part was the first half, set in our regular world. I noticed a bunch of reviewers on Goodreads saying the same. Considering that E. Nesbit was a radical Marxist, I was surprised by her obsession with royalty and how much better they are than anyone else. There was a part where the children had to fight storybook legends who were on the side of evil. The storybook legends had no power if the children didn’t know them, so I would have been super-helpful in this fight because I’d never heard of any of them. All the storybook legends were male except for a generic horde of Amazons. Trite racist trope: boy stolen by gypsies. Otherwise charming. ( )

Not one of Nesbit's best. She shines when depicting believable children in the real world, one into which magic intrudes. The fun comes in seeing how the children cope with the many disruptions it causes. But in Wet Magic, much of the story takes place in a magical undersea kingdom, and it is only mildly entertaining. ( )

Absolutely love it! Expands the imagination ( )

Absolutely love it! Expands the imagination ( )

This book deserves another review.Anyway, as far as my personal preferences go, I loved the first half of the book. It had pretty much everything I like in this genre of children's book. I liked how things built mysteriously with the fantasy elements. I liked the characters, and the things they went through.The second half was entirely different, and comparing it to the first half isn't exactly fair. I didn't like it in the same ways at all. Those of this book are completely different halves. All the mystery ends in the second half, and you're suddenly overcharged with the fantastical elements, which are thrown in here and there and everywhere. The undersea creatures don't exactly act believably or rather the fantastical elements are extremely fantastical and I think this affects the fantastical characters so that they act fantastically (though the mermaid when above ground certainly did seem more believable, if you can believe that of a seemingly part mad mermaid)—that was one of the biggest let-downs for me. It was a weird transition. But, since it is a children's book, it might not matter to most.The transition was partly from a world that seemed mostly mundane (aside from the children imagining), with a little magic, to a planet where everything (mundane stuff and all) depended on magic.However, there are some interesting things here. As the other reviewer noted, that thing about the choice was interesting. I think the book got a little more interesting to me again around that point (once the descriptions of most of the new things ended). The character references from various books were also interesting.Anyway, it's still one of my favorite books, no matter how you look at it, but it was easier to take the first half seriously, for me—not that fantasy has to be serious, mind you. It may have been an appropriate shift in realism, actually, but I was left entirely unprepared for it. There's a lot to appreciate about the latter half, too, but don't let the shift in how serious it seems distract you from it like it did for me (just be prepared and you'll probably do fine). Read it—you'll be glad later, I think. ( )