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Zilpha Keatley Snyder (1927 to 2014) was a schoolteacher, a wife and mother, and a prolific author of children’s novels, mostly fantasy with some sort of adventurous or magical setting. Snyder’s Black and Blue Magic, published in 1967, was another book that I first read in its Scholastic Book Club paperback format. It is written at an upper elementary to middle school level. I think the modern classification for this novel is urban fantasy, in which someone living an ordinary life becomes aware of and involved in an unseen magical world that is all around them. If you don’t like reading fantasy, that is fine. If you don’t like fantasy because you think it can be harmful, you should someday read Prof. Tolkien’s 1938 essay On Fairy Stories.
Black and Blue Magic is written in a light-hearted style but warmly portrays its main characters, who are Harry Houdini Marco and Mrs. Marco, his mother. Mr. Marco had been a talented stage magician (the ordinary kind) who had died when 12-year-old Harry had been just a little boy. Now Harry and Mrs. Marco survive on the income from their boarding house in San Francisco that had been converted from Mrs. Marco’s old homestead. Harry is clumsy (hence the title of black and blue magic), not great at sports, and wishes that he could live in the country and have a cool stepfather. The entire book takes place in one magical summer in San Francisco.
One short-term boarder is Mr. Mazzeeck, who turns out to be a travelling salesman of magical items, not magic tricks - real magic. Harry saves Mr. Mazzeeck from losing his suitcase full of his magical wares. This would have been the last straw for Mr. Mazzeeck, who had once been a great wizard who has gradually come down in the world due to an evil sorcerer’s jinx on him. The only way the jinx could be reversed was if wrong turned to right and out of error came good, which happens less often in this fallen world than we would like. In gratitude, Mr. Mazzeeck gives Harry a jar of magical salve, which turns out to give Harry wings to fly! He makes Harry promise that it will be a secret between them – any public notice of this gift will bring Mr. Mazzeeck further misfortune. Through a summer of flying almost every night, helping strangers and neighbors, sometimes without trying, Harry’s good heart, with and without the magic, manages to transform lives around him and his own life. Black and Blue Magic is a warm, humorous story that has embedded in it deep truths about people.