Black and Blue Magic

Harry Houdini Marco is named for a magician and cannot do a trick. His father was one and is dead; Harry has the name, the interest and none of the hands, and he goes through the world with something always in front of him to fall over. His mother's house takes boarders. One of that summer's boarders is Mr. Mazzeeck, who sells genuine magical supplies for a living and is himself under a spell.

What Mazzeeck gives him is a potion that grows wings. Snyder treats them as a physical problem before she treats them as a wonder — the flying gets experimented with, and the pleasure of the middle of this book is a clumsy boy becoming competent at the one impossible thing. He flies over San Francisco, and the wings stay a completely private enjoyment.

That restraint is the point and it is also the reservation: very little is at stake here. The magic is spent on pleasure rather than on a plot, and a reader who came for a quest will be waiting a long time. It lands for the child who is the clumsy one, and it lands harder if that child has already worked out that being handed a superpower would not actually fix the problem — which is closer to what this book is about than the wings are.