Mary Poppins Universe

She arrives on the east wind, hired without references, and slides up the banister. Mary Poppins is not kind. She is vain about her reflection in shop windows, sniffs at questions, and flatly denies every impossible thing the moment it has finished happening — and the Banks children adore her precisely because she never once explains herself. Cherry Tree Lane is an ordinary London street where the stars are put up by a lady with a ladder and the dog next door has firm opinions. P. L. Travers wrote eight books between 1934 and 1988 — Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Opens the Door, In the Park, and the later, stranger volumes set in and around Cherry Tree Lane — plus an alphabet, a cookery book with a story running through it, and the collected editions that keep them all in print. The books are sharper and colder than the film, and better for it: myth keeps leaking in at the edges, with the Pleiades down shopping for Christmas presents and a snake who turns out to be a distant relation. Read them in publication order, beginning with Mary Poppins. Each is a set of separate outings rather than a plot, so they can be dipped into — but the departures, and she leaves at the end of every book, land hardest in sequence.