Mary Poppins

I hate to spoil your image of Mary Poppins but...well, I'm going to spoil your image of Mary Poppins. The version that P.L. Travers created was very different from the one Disney dreamed up. She was a vain woman who seemed to be more concerned with her own appearance than with how she spoke to the children under her care. I found it almost unsettling how biting and cruel she was toward Jane and Michael (the twins John and Barbara featured in one chapter and were incidental to the rest of the story). However, just as in the movie version the children were in awe of her and loved her very much (her feelings about them were not quite as clear). I do think this is worth a read for anyone who grew up watching the Disney classic especially show more because it gives new dimensions to Mary Poppins AND details new adventures. show less

This is a perfect book about the nanny everyone loves, Mary Poppins. The reader can certainly recognize her from the movie in her extreme competence and ability to problem solve, but she's both a little harsher and more mystical in the book. There's a lovely scene in which she discusses with a starling the fact that babies can talk to animals and forces of nature because we are all one thing, but everyone, except Mary herself, loses that ability as they grow out of babyhood. In a scene at the night zoo we find that Mary is first cousin, once removed, to a king cobra. That accounts for her imposing nature, her refusal to waste time being nice, her demand for respect. I'd read that Travers was not happy with the Disneyfication of her show more book, and I'll bet that the leaving out of her mysticism was a great part of that dissatisfaction. Well worth reading at any age. show less

The literary Mary Poppins is quite unlike the movie Mary Poppins. For one, she's not nice. For two, she has no mission to improve the children or their relationship with their parents. And, finally, the movie version hints at Marry Poppins' vanity and mysteriousness, but in the book Mary Poppins is much more vain and mysterious.

Even though it's got some sharp edges, the book is completely wonderful. It's more like a series of short stories than a novel. There are adventures in the zoo at night, a look at where stars come from and how babies can hear the wind and the birds and the sun talking. Mary Poppins is magical in a completely befuddling way. What is she? Where did she come from? Why do magical things always happen when someone's show more birthday falls on a full moon? There are no answers. Instead you're left wondering and musing, just like Jane and Michael.

The audio book narrator was very, very good as well. This would be a great choice for a family with young children (ages 4 or 5 and up) to listen to together. It would also make a great bedtime read aloud. show less

So much stranger than the movie made it out to be - Mary Poppins's London is a dark place, full of mysterious forces and strange creatures. It comes across as quite harsh in a modern context, I think. Not only does Mary force the family's children to stay in place, but mystical creatures are browbeaten into place by their parents. The whole thing is a grim kind of whimsy, one where the world is full of secrets and you are to be denied access to them.

Hadn't read the original till now; indeed, the new movie (Mary Poppins Returns) seems to stay quite true to the capricious, vain, forbidding, cold, and kind (in turns) Mary Poppins of the book. She arrives on the East Wind and leaves on the West Wind, and in between she visits all kinds of bewildering wonders on the Banks children, Jane and Michael (and the infant twins Barbara and John). After each adventure or observed oddity that leaves Jane and Michael marveling, Mary Poppins insists she has no idea what they're talking about - a bit like Ms. Frizzle after a field trip, only somehow more sinister.

"Don't you know," she said pityingly, "that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?" (28)

"But Grown-ups never mean what they say, it show more seems to me." (Barbara to John, 140)

"It's no good asking her. She knows everything, but she never tells," said Jane. (153)

"We are all made of the same stuff, remember..." (Hamadryad to Jane and Michael, 174)

"Could we have imagined it?"
"Perhaps...We imagine strange and lovely things, my darling." (Michael and Mother, 194) show less

Thank goodness. A classic children's tale that doesn't suck. :)

Please, please be cross!

Well, in with the wind and out with the change, I say, and there's nothing more delightful than a rather hard-hitting charm-blaster like this. Mary herself is such an insufferable vanity, but she has such heart, and kids will always know the good ones from the bad. They always do. And it has NOTHING at all to do with a spoonful of sugar.

Stuff and nonsense. That stuff is all for the birds.


The best part is... my girl loved it. :)

Ms. Travers does not placate to children--and neither does Mary Poppins.

Ms. Travers was steeped in mythologies and folklore and created Mary not as just some nanny but as more of- for lack of a better word- Goddess, or perhaps another easier to understand concept, a Shaman.

For Mary took the children with her on Multidimensional journeys.

Bert, the Match-man, appears in only one chapter and it is subtle in what it implies and completely mysterious...but...it is clear that Bert knows who Mary really is....

Of course, no one should understand her, she is not of this world. She is seen as "vain"; as she "puts on such airs"; gazes at her own reflection in shop-windows; is often "cross." but Mary knows herself as She Is, as sovereign and show more free. She isn't here to conform to this world; she doesn't see her employer as being above her in any way.

"Mary Poppins never wasted time being nice": She wasn't "nice" she was Real and she embodied true kindness on a very deep level. She was stern with the children because the society they lived in demanded they learn discipline. Further more, it grounded them after Journeys that they not dwell too much on what they just saw. Mary was only planting seeds in their consciousness. How they grew up was up to them. show less