50th Anniversary Book Review: A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
Discover one of the first books about a kid with ESP.
A Gift of Magic
Originally Published: September 23, 1971*
Many of us love stories involving ESP, no matter what medium they're told through. The Sookie Stackhouse series, the Twilight saga, That’s So Raven, and Angel are just a couple which probably come to mind.
When it comes to older stories on the subject, the main story people think of is probably Stephen King’s The Shining, where five-year-old Danny Torrance has haunting visions of what will happen as his family stays at the Overlook Hotel, and his father Jack undergoes serious torment while working as the hotel’s caretaker during the winter, having to struggle with writer’s block, alcohol withdrawal, and a fierce desire to protect his family from the dark forces which seem to reside at the Overlook.
Yes, I think this is an amazing novel which did wonders for stories about ESP. However, this book’s fiftieth anniversary is still six years away, and as you may have suspected, it’s not the first novel ever written where a kid has ESP. Instead, the following review is for a lesser-known novel from 1971 called A Gift of Magic, where twelve-year-old Nancy Garrett discovers the strong instincts she’s always had might be part of a special gift passed on by her grandmother years ago.
The story begins with a brief prologue where a dying old woman is speaking with her daughter Elizabeth. She lets her know that she intends to leave the house to her, along with something for each of her grandchildren. However, it’s not something like jewelry or a million dollars. Instead, these gifts are specific talents. For her oldest granddaughter, Kirby, it’s the gift of dance. For a grandson who has yet to be born (whom we later learn is Nancy’s younger brother Brendon), it will be the gift of music. She then starts saying what gift her youngest granddaughter, Nancy, will inherit, but her voice starts fading as she says what it is, and a devastated Elizabeth is incapable of hearing her.
Years later, Nancy Garrett and her family return to her mother’s seaside hometown in Florida for the first time in ages. Her father is a photographer who travels around the world for his work, so she’s been used to living in hotels much of her life. At first, she thinks they’ll only be staying for a few weeks, but then Elizabeth informs the children she intends to settle down here permanently because she thinks that for a man like their father, having a family with him all the time while traveling can be a hinderance, especially now that he’s been offered work in places where it’s more dangerous for families, and as a result, the two of them intend to get divorced.
It’s at this moment, as Nancy is left furious over this news, when we get our first glimpse into her unusual gift as she starts having a vision of her father in a café in Paris:
“His eyes were clear and green like Brendon’s and his brows were Nancy’s, straight and blond, and his great handsome head was tilted sideways as if listening intently to what the man across the table from him was saying. It was a business lunch and he was getting briefed on his next assignment. There was a notebook by his plate and a pencil, but the page of the book was empty, for he had not been taking notes. His mind was away from the conversation; it was stretching out toward Nancy, toward all of them. She felt it touch her and sweep over her, painful and unsettled.”
After this, the vision is over, and the only thing Nancy says about it is that she knows her father is unhappy. She has yet to recognize her own abilities, but we can already tell how strong they are, and how they allow her to watch over her family in a way other kids could only dream of.
The family goes on to settle down in Palmelo, Florida. Elizabeth gets a job in the local library and happily comes across an old high school boyfriend, Tom Duncan, who’s now working as a guidance counselor at the junior high school. Kirby, who’s a dedicated dancer, manages to get accepted for lessons at the local dance studio despite being thirteen (most dancers begin lessons at younger ages) and never having formal training before. Brendon, a highly energetic boy at age nine, starts looking forward to school not so much because he likes learning but because he wants to spent time with other boys for once in his life.
As for Nancy, she ends up being placed one grade ahead of where she belongs, meaning she’s to be in the same grade level as Kirby. She worries that her sister might be upset about this, but Kirby, who’s more easy- going than Nancy, doesn’t mind at all, claiming this way they can split their homework in half so she can have more time to practice her ballet.
It’s while at school that we see Nancy’s powers at work again. During a social studies quiz, she thinks she hears several questions being asked, which she immediately writes the answers to. However, her teacher Ms. Green stops her, claiming she has not given out those questions yet, and therefore accusing Nancy of cheating. Nancy insists she simply guessed the answers, but Ms. Green doesn’t buy it, and upon realizing her sister’s also in one of her classes, she starts believing Nancy got the answers from Kirby before class started. Nancy denies this, resulting in Miss Green ordering her to meet up in the guidance counselor’s office after school along with Kirby.
Of course, the girls end up meeting with Mr. Duncan, and Kirby correctly guesses he will try being fair with them. While Miss Green continues with her harshness, Mr. Duncan allows the girls to share their side of what happened. Kirby admits she may have been thinking about the quiz questions while sitting with Nancy during lunch, but she hadn’t said anything to Nancy about it, insisting that if she somehow got the answers ahead of time, it was by accident. Mr. Duncan then requests her to explain this, and Kirby says it’s a sort of hobby of Nancy’s, to do things with her mind.
We now get the first mention of extrasensory perception in this book as Mr. Duncan says, “I would like to hear a bit more of this ability of Nancy’s. There is such a thing as extrasensory perception, you know, although we don’t run into it too often.” Miss Green thinks this sounds insane, but Mr. Duncan insists he believes ESP exists, even going so far as to say he knew the girls’ grandmother and that he often wondered if she had such abilities. He tells the girls there’s a psychiatrist in Palmelo named Dr. Russo who’s done experiments in that field, seeming to suggest that Nancy could try working with him sometime. The meeting between them ends shortly after this.
About two months later, Dr. Russo ends up meeting with Nancy at her home, explaining that he plans to run a series of tests on her to see if she might have ESP. Nancy is hesitant at first, but she eventually gives in and takes a test where she must guess what certain cards look like. When Nancy gives him her written results, he doesn’t tell her how many she got right or wrong. Instead, he says there are bound to be some wrong answers, but it’s the overall percentage that matters. After he leaves, Brendon shows a rare moment of sympathy for his sister, telling her that she probably did well on the test because Dr. Russo didn’t check very far. However, Nancy believes she didn’t do well at all, and she begs Brendon not to tell anyone about the meeting or her possible abilities.
After this, life goes on as usual for the Garretts. Nancy starts taking piano lessons, and while she is terrible at the piano, Brendon seems to have more talent for music despite not taking lessons himself. He corrects her when she makes mistakes while playing, and one time Nancy and Elizabeth catch him playing “Three Blind Mice” by ear. Kirby thrives in her ballet classes, where she begins getting private lessons from one of the teachers instead of the usual group classes, gets the part of the Snow Queen in the dance studio’s Christmas production of The Nutcracker, and is then offered a chance at getting a scholarship to study at a Ballet Company in Atlanta. However, Nancy is rarely happy for her sister; she often wishes Kirby showed more interest in typical things like school, friends, and boys rather than being fully devoted to dancing.
However, the person she seems to show the most adversity towards is Mr. Duncan, who continues getting closer to their mother, even spending time with the family during Christmas. Much to Nancy’s dismay, her parents’ divorce is finalized sooner than expected, and she refuses to accept this fact. She feels offended over how easily her family has adjusted to life in Florida, and even tells Kirby that perhaps their parents can still eventually remarry because other couples do that all the time. After Mr. Duncan’s visit during Christmas, she tells her mother to stop seeing him until after the kids can see their father again, and Elizabeth reluctantly agrees.
It takes a while, but Nancy soon puts her ESP to practice. One Saturday afternoon, she goes up to the attic to look at some of her family’s old belongings. Among several pictures of her mother when she was younger, she finds a picture of her grandmother when she was young, and Nancy is astonished to realize just how much she looks like her. And when she closes her eyes, she can still see her grandmother’s face, and it feels to her as if “It had been waiting all these many years to come into her mind, and now it was there, and it had no intention of ever leaving.”
She then feels as if her mind were taking her some place, and before she knows it, she’s been placed in the scene of the book’s prologue, where her grandmother is telling her mother what each of her grandchildren’s gifts will be. And at the time she’s supposed to say what Nancy’s gift will be, she addresses Nancy directly, saying “To you, a sort of magic. Do you want it?”
Nancy responds that she doesn’t know because her gift scares her and she’s not sure how to use it. Her grandmother responds to her with the following:
“You will learn. You must learn if you accept it. A gift is nothing unless it’s used. A mind must be exercised, stretched, trained to its full potential, like a dancer’s body, like the hands of a pianist.”
Shortly after this, Nancy finds herself back in the attic, amazed over what she’s just done. It feels strange to her, but at the same time she realizes the experience was beautiful. She briefly wonders why her gift had not been passed on to her mother, and realizes that because of how vulnerable she can be, perhaps she couldn’t accept such a powerful gift as ESP. And at this moment, Nancy finally accepts her abilities, understanding that “Whatever this power was that had been given to her, it had been given out of love.”
Nancy goes on to have several other experiences with her powers. One is rather funny, the other results in a family member being saved, while another incident she believes she causes turns out not being her fault at all. Towards the end, she slowly starts accepting how she can’t always manage the lives of her family, and even grows to accept Mr. Duncan. I won’t give away the ending, but just know two things: no one dies, and things go quite well after one of the more dramatic incidents in the story.
…
So, do I think this is a good story?
Let’s just say I accept it for what it is: a coming- of- age story of a girl discovering she has psychic powers, which was originally written for kids between the ages of eight and twelve. Because of this, you can’t expect to find a lot of terrifying or gory moments in this story as you do with novels for adults like The Shinning.
I think it’s also worth noting that I originally read this novel when I was thirteen and had recently read another of Lois’ Duncan’s novels, Don’t Look Behind You, as a group read in my seventh- grade Literature class. That novel was about a teenage girl whose family must enter the witness protection program after she witnesses a murder, meaning it was obviously more intense than this book was. Despite my interest in Duncan’s work, I was still a bit afraid of horror back then, and A Gift of Magic seemed a little tamer than some of her other novels. I can’t say I loved the book, but I still enjoyed it. My interest in older stories certainly helped with that. Now that I’m older, it’s mostly okay. I wouldn’t put this at the top of my list for novels of the 1970s, but it might still get an honorable mention.
I can see why some readers wouldn’t enjoy it. Given the reputation of Lois Duncan as one of the most celebrated authors of young adult horror, including the YA classic I Know What You Did Last Summer, you may originally read this story with high expectations. You may expect the story to be about a teenager who has horrific visions of people being murdered or of friends getting into freaky accidents (a common incident in Duncan’s novels), and walk away disappointed over the lack of true horror in this novel.
Or you may take issue with Nancy’s character. She does come across as the textbook definition of a “Negative Nancy” many times throughout the novel. She sure spends too much time fretting over how much she hates the changes her family’s going through long after everyone else has moving on with life in Florida. She may be highly intelligent and protective of her family, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if she wasn’t so serious about everything.
Maybe it would be better if she encouraged Kirby to go for the dance scholarship instead of wishing she would simply think more about boys (how archaic is that?), or if she joked along with Brendon instead of complaining whenever he teases her, or better yet, if she supported her mother when she started spending time with Mr. Duncan. Or perhaps she could have tested out her psychic powers more often, using them to uncover more of her family’s biggest secrets or to mess around with Miss Green on more than one occasion. Or maybe what she really needed was a stay at a haunted place like the Overlook Hotel so she could really test out how powerful she was.
Well, if you take issue with Nancy Garrett over her moodiness, I have some bad news for you about the many YA and even children’s novels from the 70s: they’re full of angsty kids, and these angsty kids are often dealing with as many tough issues as she is.
The old rules for children’s literature, where kids had to be polite and pleasant most of the time and writers were usually not allowed to explore controversial topics, no longer applied as much during the 1970s. With the publication of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders in 1967, writers for young people felt more free to explore themes which were taboo in the past and we got many outstanding YA and children’s classics as a result.
In 1970, we got Judy Blume’s famous YA novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, where the titular character struggles with both understanding her own religious beliefs and going through puberty, and the Newberry Medal winning Summer of the Swans, where a teenage girl must search for her younger brother, who hasn’t spoken a word in years. These were far from comfort reads, showing that literature for teens and children was just as capable of examining difficult topics as the controversial adult novels of John Updike, Jaqueline Susann, and Phillip Roth did.
In fact, I find it worth noting that on the same year this novel was published, one of the biggest bestsellers of the year was none other than The Exorcist, where as you all probably know, a girl very close to Nancy’s age is possessed by a demon. It may have been written for adults, but if that isn’t a great horror novel about preteens dealing with tough stuff, then I don’t know what is!
It's also worth noting that Lois Duncan based this novel both on an ESP study she participated in while she was in college during the 1950s and on her own experiences raising her three oldest children from her first marriage. Like Elizabeth Garrett, she ended up getting divorced and eventually remarrying, having two more children (including a daughter who was tragically murdered in 1989, a crime which went unsolved until this year and changed the focus of Duncan’s work after the 80s). This novel was rejected seven times before it was accepted for publication, with the explanation being that children probably wouldn’t be interested in a novel about ESP. It’s also reasonable to assume that ESP, not to mention divorce, were topics that some publishers would have found unsuitable for a children’s book during the 60s. The fact that it was finally published in 1971 shows how much more open-minded children’s publishers were starting to become at the time.
With this information in mind, Nancy Garrett may seem less of an annoying killjoy and more of a struggling pre-teen who can’t accept the sudden changes she’s having to go through. She must deal with being separated from a father she loves very much and family members who can’t seem to understand why she can’t adapt to their new home as easily as they do. Her sister, despite being good-natured, can’t give her the support she needs because she’s so interested in her dancing that little else matters to her, and her mother appears to be replacing her father with someone she used to be romantically involved with. On top of that, she finds out she’s inherited some weird magical abilities from her grandmother, which she has little idea what to do with. With all of this going on, who can blame Nancy for being so moody?
The other characters certainly have their strengths as well. I like Kirby and find her story to be just as interesting as Nancy’s. A separate story detailing her commitment to ballet and how she deals with obsessive impulses and eventual disappointment would be something I’d willingly read. I also wish Duncan had chosen to look more deeply into the weight insecurities she was starting to develop, rather than simply letting readers know how serious it might have been later in the novel. It would have made this novel much more revolutionary this way.
Brendon comes across as fun comic relief at times, even if he does annoy Nancy too much while his gift of music has little impact on his character. Elizabeth Garrett seems like a good mother who does the best she can for her children, thoughtfully addressing their concerns over the divorce and even being willing to give up a relationship with Mr. Duncan for Nancy’s sake. Not many parents would do this. Mr. Duncan feels quite similar, protecting the kids from trouble on several occasions and knowing just how to motivate them when they need it. You can tell why he’s such a good match for Elizabeth.
Could this novel have used more scares? Perhaps. Could it have just been more exciting in general? I sort of agree. This does feel more like a slice-of -life story than an early version of an R.L. Stine book, which makes it feel a little slow at times. If you love action- packed horror novels, this may not be the best read for you. However, if you like horror that’s tamer and enjoy vintage YA or children’s books, this may be a good book for you. This could also be a good book to introduce certain younger readers to ESP. It’s not scary enough to cause bad dreams, but it still has some intense moments that might grab their attention. There are even definitions of the different types of ESP, which could help them better understand what the whole concept is.
So, if you’re still willing to read this for yourselves, you may be wondering how easy it is to find this book. My answer is that you’ll probably have to hunt through many secondhand stores if you want to find the version I read. Most of Lois Duncan’s novels were updated around 2010 so that they would be more suitable for modern readers, replacing older tech devices with newer ones, including cell phones and GPS, and even changing some characters names and ages. In the case of A Gift of Magic, Nancy and Kirby were changed to be a bit older than they are in the original version, and at least one minor character had their name changed.
I don’t approve of changes like this because it makes it seem as if teenagers these days either aren’t smart enough to understand older novels or would simply get bored by them. It may be true for some kids, but there are probably many others who like exploring the classics and would be disappointed upon finding out that these aren’t the original versions of the books.
It could be fun to see what a modern version of an older YA book is like, but if writers or publishers must do this, they should at least make sure the original versions are still available for those who want to read them. Otherwise, they’re doing a disservice to both readers of the original stories who probably still want to find the earlier editions and newer readers who won’t have the opportunity to read these stories as they were originally written. I had to go to several secondhand stores to find original versions of both this novel and three other Lois Duncan novels because they’re impossible to find anywhere else, even at my local library, which had many of the originals back when I was a teenager.
So, if you’re willing to take up the challenge, either search for older copies of this book on eBay or go to several Goodwill, Savers, or Half Price Books stores, then prepare to spend about a week going through one of the oldest books about a kid with ESP. Afterwards, you can see for yourself whether this is an underrated classic, a boring kids book, or something in between.
Either way, be sure to stick around for more of my takes on books from the 70s and 80s. If this isn’t a novel you’re hoping to discover more about for yourself, perhaps you’ll find one later on.
*Some websites claim this novel was originally published in 1960, but I’ve dismissed this as the original publication year for two reasons. First off, Wikipedia gives the official date of publication as September 23rd, 1971, and the version I’ve read gives the publication year as 1971 as well. Also, it would have been very difficult getting a children’s book dealing with issues like divorce and ESP published in the US in 1960. As noted in this review, it was towards the early 70s that we started getting more children’s books dealing with controversial issues like this.
50th Anniversary Book Review: A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
Thank you for sharing your review! I don't think that this is a book that I would personally want to read, but it sounds interesting in parts and it was really nice to read about the history of young adult publication! I have never read anything by Lois Duncan before, not even her more popular books. I honestly didn't even know that I Know What You Did Last Summer was based on a book, though I should have.
It was so much more difficult to publish back then! I am more grateful than ever for the opportunity to self-publish.
What I do like about Duncan, even though I do not know much about her and have never read any of her books, is that she knew that this was a difficult sell, but she didn't give up and eventually she got it published. That's fantastic.