Mary Poppins
by
[Reynal & Hitchcock, $1.50]
PARENTS, SO quick to play with airplane models and electric trains, are apt to be hesitant in their choice of ‘the new juveniles.’ They have too much sentiment in rereading their own childhood favorites to wish to explore new fields. It is, therefore, entirely owing to my nine-year-old’s initiative that I made the acquaintance of that most engaging character, Mary Poppins. This fantasy by P. L. Travers is truly ‘for the grown-up as well as the child.’ I am not sure I admit it to the very front rank: it hardly compares in subtlety with Alice in Wonderland, nor in beauty with that dearest of all books, The Wind in the Willows. I can even imagine penthouse parents scowling in sophistication at some of its whimsy — in spite of the dog that was ‘half an Airedale and half a Retriever and the worst half of both.’
The Mary who gives the book its title is an original character: a testy governess in neat tan shoes who from the moment she comes sliding up the banisters, who from the moment, she begins to discover things in her marvelous empty carpetbag, has her children in thrall. Her testiness is well directed against Parents’ Prerogatives: once the elders are out of sight she introduces her small charges to all manner of extraordinary adventures. My favorite chapter, ‘A Day Out,’ is especially delicious. The illustrator, Mary Shepard, is so felicitous that discerning readers will remember her name. The book deserves the success it is enjoying; it will, I feel sure, live to be thrust upon our grandchildren us ‘one of the books I adored when I was just your age.’
FREDERICA WEEKS