Opening the Door
This book is my favorite in PL Travis's "Mary Poppins" series primarily because of one story, "The Marble Boy." In this hauntingly lovely story, Travers offers a blend of winsome poignance with a lesson in Classic Greek mythology, her trademark whimsy, and the bracingly unsentimental English nanny figure of Mary Poppins. I bought this book so my daughter could read the story, which I have loved and carried in memory since my own childhood. The copy I received did not carry the author's note to "The Fifth of November"; written in 1939 on the eve of the second world war, it is a statement that is surely one of the most eloquent and poetic expressions of hope offered to children and grownups, everywhere.
