The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers

The Bastable children are back, and they're absolutely determined to be good. Really this time. After their family's fortunes improved, Oswald and his siblings made a solemn pact: they would be helpful, charitable, and model children. This is, as anyone who knows the Bastables could predict, a spectacular disaster. Their attempts at virtue spiral into magnificent chaos. Hosting their prim cousins Denny and Daisy becomes a garden jungle that their guardians definitely did not approve of. Every well-meaning scheme backfires gloriously. The children scheme and squabble withirresistible energy, leaving wreckage in their wake while genuinely trying their best. It's a paradox that Nesbit understood perfectly: being good is far harder than finding treasure. What's revolutionary about Nesbit is she lets children bechildren: selfish, scheming, occasionally awful, and utterly alive. The Wouldbegoods captures that special childhood alchemy where good intentions collide with glorious disaster, and somehow it's all enormously funny. If you loved the Boxcar Children or Burnett's work, this is where those books got their heart and their chaos from.