Posted on by TracyC

Out of Their Minds

Out of Their Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1998.

When the book begins, Princess Lenora and Prince Coren are going to Andilla, where their wedding will finally be held. (That seems to go against earlier books in the series, where they were planning to hold their wedding in Gepeth, but whatever. It turns out the Balance that governs this world has decided that it demands it, and so do the authors and story plot.) However, Lenora has been having strange, disturbing dreams about her vanquished alter ego, Hevak.

Lenora is still preoccupied by the concept of the Balance that governs their world and keeps it from descending into chaos because of the powerful mental abilities that the people in their world have. She still feels like the rules that help maintain the Balance are too restrictive, particularly in her home country of Gepeth, and it bothers her that there doesn’t seem to be a system that makes everyone perfectly happy. Somehow, no matter what system people in different countries have, someone is always unhappy or doesn’t fit in with the way the country lives. Lenora dreams of developing a perfect system of life and Balance, providing every individual person with perfect happiness and justice. Fortunately, since the last book in the series, she has come to realize that before she attempts to create a perfect world, she needs to think it over more and decide what a perfect world really looks like and how it should work.

It’s noble goal, and I don’t consider myself a cranky old cynic who hates youthful enthusiasm, but anyone who’s ever tried to get a roomful of people to agree on pizza toppings only to learn that at least one person in that room is also gluten intolerant and can’t eat the pizza at all unless you specifically take that into account at the beginning of the process knows that finding any system that makes absolutely everyone happy is not an easy process. Even putting together a system in which the majority of people are pretty happy most of the time is a major undertaking and involves taking into account various real world conditions and different peoples’ needs, things which Lenora has previously found boring and completely ignored in her lessons. She usually likes to play with ideas and consider possibilities more than getting into the nitty gritty details of how things actually work. I’m saying that she’s got a long way to go.

However, Lenora and Coren soon encounter other problems which are even more pressing than the preparations for their upcoming wedding. Something is very wrong in Andilla. Usually, the people there prefer using their imaginations to change their perceptions of reality rather than doing anything to actually change reality itself. They let their buildings turn to ruins as they live in the mansions of their imaginations, which is why Prince Coren prefers the way people in Gepeth live, actually creating and maintaining real things. (When Lenora sees what Andilla is like, she decides that she’ll never think of Coren as a coward again, as she has in previous books. He is usually more cautious than she is, but Lenora comes to recognize that it has taken courage for him to acknowledge the way his people really live outside of their imaginations instead of trying to hide from it and live in his own mind. It’s a step forward for Lenora.) People in Andilla also use telepathy to communicate directly with each other, mind to mind, rather than speaking out loud, something even Coren finds invasive at times although he uses that power, too. However, the people of Andilla are suddenly losing their ability to communicate telepathically, and their ability to maintain their imagined realities is fading. They’re having to resort to speaking aloud and seeing things as they really are, and Coren’s mother is beside herself. Coren’s father, the King of Andilla, hardly even seems aware of the problem because he has become deeply absorbed in his new hobby, baking things. People in Andilla usually do very little cooking, just turning very basic foods into whatever they want to imagine that they’re eating, but the King Arno has discovered the joy of baking in the new kitchen that Lenora’s parents actually created for his castle out of sheer desperation.

Kaylor, the Thoughtwatcher, who is the person responsible for maintaining Andilla’s version of the Balance, suspects that the king’s recent cooking might be responsible for shattering Andilla’s illusions, but most people don’t think that’s it. Everyone in the country seems to be affected, although King Arno can’t recall his two closest advisers complaining. Actually, he can’t recall seeing them around at all since the trouble began. Actually, nobody else has ever heard either of their names before. Actually, it looks like King Arno probably invented them as imaginary friends when he was a boy, forgot he invented them, and has been following their imaginary advice ever since because it generally seems to work out.

Lenora suggests that, since there don’t seem to be any answers to the immediate problem in the castle, she and Coren should go out to the countryside, meet the people of Andilla directly, and see if there are any answers there. (Plus they can get away from their annoying doubles, Leni and Cori, who were created in the last book, and the argument they’re having over who really owns Coren’s old room and the stuff in it.) Queen Milda and King Arno admit that, although they’ve spoken to many of their subjects with their minds, they’ve never actually met them face-to-face.

As Lenora questions Coren about the people in the castle and life in Andilla, she is also surprised to learn that, although everyone in the kingdom eats an odd kind of blue mush at every meal (while imagining it to be something far better), even Coren isn’t quite sure what the mush is made of and where it comes from. Of all of the people in his kingdom, Coren is the one who was always more interested in living in reality than fantasy and finding out how things really work, and it seems odd to Lenora that he’s never questioned the food that he’s eaten at every meal for his entire life in Andilla. According to Coren, it just appears in vats every day, and people help themselves to it or have a servant bring them some. No matter how empty the vats are at the end of the day, they’re always full the following day, and he has no idea who fills them, how, or why. To his surprise, Coren realizes that he’s never even thought to question it before, although he’s questioned nearly everything else. Lenora starts to wonder if that could be a key to the puzzle and if Coren actually has some kind of mental block against questioning the food, perhaps something his own people intentionally put there in order to keep their country’s version of the “Balance” in place, reinforcing the version of reality they’ve chosen to live in.

Investigation of the countryside reveals a previously unknown side to Andilla that everyone there has been ignoring, along with the dilapidated condition of their own homes and society. In a place where no community is supposed to be is an entire town of strangely neat, well-kept houses (the only well-kept houses in Andilla) and people all dressed alike whose only goal in life is constant work. The people there, who call themselves Skwoes, seem surprised that Lenora and Coren can even see them. They are the source of the blue mush that the other Andillans eat, although everyone else is unaware of it. The Skwoes are a forgotten part of Andilla’s Balance because everyone is too busy living in their imagination to notice them. Although they feed the rest of the population in exchange for payment from Andilla’s supply of gold, according to an ancient arrangement, they are disdainful of the lazy population they support, who spend their entire time living in their imaginations. (This is when we learn that none of our main characters have any idea what the word “economy” means, not to mention being completely unaware of the fact that Andilla actually has one.)

That explains part of the mystery, but there is still the question of why the Andillans have now lost their powers of imagination or why Lenora’s bad dreams about Hevak are getting increasingly worse.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Hevak is back … sort of. In the first book of the series, Lenora made her evil alter ego, Hevak disappear. But, we’ve also previously established that everything Lenora creates actually does exist somewhere. Exactly where Hevak went is somewhat nebulous, but he manages to communicate to Lenora that, when she made him disappear before, she accidentally sent him to another world where everything is the opposite of what it is in their world. Hevak says that this world really is the perfect world that Lenora has always dreamed of creating, where everything is happy. He also claims that he has now turned “good” himself and wants to help Lenora make everything in her world “good.” Hevak’s influence has been what has been causing all of this disruption to everyone’s powers, and he begins taking over Lenora.

Lenora does have a genuine desire to make the world a better place. She really always has wanted the world to be better, but what that means changes over the course of the series. At first, Lenora thought that making a better world involved more excitement, more freedom, and fewer rules. In this book, it’s about people loving each other and having all of their needs fulfilled. In the end, the characters aren’t completely sure whether that part was Hevak’s idea or whether Lenora’s desire for a better world was what called Hevak back from wherever he is now, but it does call into question what “good” really is and whether it really is possible to have too much of a “good” thing.

When Lenora, under Hevak’s control, tries to be “good” and help everyone with even their tiniest problems, she does create some fantastic and helpful machines that last even beyond the latest adventure. However, this form of “good” and trying to help everyone goes way too far because it is an extreme form. There is no “Balance” to it. In her “good” form, Lenora unconsciously drains other people of their powers, apparently so she can use them herself to make everyone “happy” and build the perfect world. She uses the Andillan ability to read minds in order to plant the suggestion of love in everyone’s mind, drawing them to her because she is suddenly ultra-appealing to everyone, and to find out what everyone wants and needs. Then, she uses the Gepethian of creation to make everything as everyone wants. Because this is an out-of-balance approach to making people happy, Lenora ends up being ultra-controlling (something she normally hates herself, when she’s in her right mind) of other people, and also because she has this desperate, uncontrollable need to make everyone happy, she struggles to grant their tiniest wishes, whether or not they would actually be good for anyone involved. Some of the wishes people have might make them happy in the moment but would be terrible for them in the long run, like young Sayley’s wish to never stop eating because she’s enjoying the food so much, and Lenora, in her current state, is unable to think beyond this desperate need to just give everyone whatever they want the moment that they want it. Coren, recognizing the problem, tries to free Lenora from the influence of Hevak but ends up under Lenora’s control himself because he loves even without the telepathic influence and the efforts to please everyone and cannot help being drawn to her.

Fortunately, Lenora, being a human girl even with her extended powers, soon begins to find everyone’s constant demands on her overwhelming. Even in the midst of this unbalanced effort to make everyone happy, no one is ever completely happy. Just like in the last book, where Lenora visited the distant past and witnessed a completely out-of-control world where everyone could do absolutely anything they wanted with their minds, it quickly becomes apparent that getting everything a person can think of instantly doesn’t make them happy. No sooner does someone thing of something they want and get it, they think of something else that they also want. Sometimes, people change their minds about what they want because what they got didn’t make them as happy as they expected it would. Human wants and needs and the imagination to think of new possibilities are never-ending. These are the basic reasons why humans never achieve perfect happiness. Eventually, Lenora snaps under the pressure of trying to keep up this impossible system when Coren, who at first only wanted to love Lenora and seemed like he was the only one truly happy with her, suddenly decides that he needs a glass of water and that it must have a straw. Yep, that’s the last straw that finally annoys Lenora enough to break Hevak’s hold on her.

I already mentioned above that creating a perfect system of anything is difficult, especially when you have many people with competing needs and some with needs that are completely unknown. Throughout the series, both Lenora and Coren have been learning more about the way their world and their powers function, which I think is good because it shows character growth. Usually, it’s Lenora who needs to learn something, but in this book, Coren also learns about sides of his own home country that he never knew existed before. There is an entire group of people in Andilla he knew nothing about, and they’re the only reason why there is “Balance” in Andilla and why the system there keeps working (not to mention their “economy”). The Skwoes and the other Andillans are total opposites in the way they live their lives. While most Andillans live in their imaginations to the point where they have completely lost touch with reality and the state they actually live in, the Skwoes have shunned all imagination and creativity in the name of practical work. Both groups are extreme, and up to this point, they have needed to be extreme in order to maintain a Balance with each other. But, maybe they don’t actually have to be that way because Balance can also mean reaching a happy medium. Lenora comes to realize that the difference between the Gepethian Balance and the Andillan Balance is that the Andillan Balance is more communal (although about half of the community was completely unaware of it up to this point), with one group of extremists balancing another group of extremists. In Gepeth, society focuses more on making individual people behave in a more balanced way. In the past, Lenora has found the enforced individual responsibility in Gepeth repressive, but she actually comes to appreciate it as a more balanced approach than the Andillan extremes.

In the end, the different groups in Andilla (now that they really know about each other), begin building a new form of Balance where some of each of their qualities being rubbing off on each other. The formerly purely imaginative Andillans come to see that they do need to face some parts of reality in order to rebuild their crumbling buildings and society, and they work out new contracts with the Skwoes to help them take care of these practical projects. Meanwhile, the Skwoes, freed from the monotony of just producing blue mush (made from some kind of plant material that’s never fully explained), begin enjoying these new work projects and actually not feeling bad about enjoying something for once. This new variety of work has a creative side that reawakens some of the Skwoes’ latent imaginations, and the book leaves the impression that the different Andillan groups will develop and new Balance of creativity and practicality. Also, Coren, who was troubled before about the way his people lived and even resisted using his powers too much because it felt too out-of-balance to him, comes to realize that using his powers sometimes is also part of the Balance and comes to appreciate his own abilities more.

Even though part of this story really reiterated some of the themes of the last book, I thought that it also did a good job of exploring Andillan, delving into how such a world could actually work, and considering new possibilities for it to change. Lenora also becomes more thoughtful as a person in this book. Some of that was partly from her unnaturally increasing need to be “good” and help people, but the characters also consider that it was partly Lenora’s real desire to make the world better that may have accidentally summoned Hevak back. Lenora and Hevak are two sides of the same person (with Hevak being the more unbalanced one in everything he does), so this desire to be helpful is still a part of Lenora’s personality. Lenora also continues to use the lesson that she learned in the last book about the need to think before she acts (although her thoughts are disrupted due to Hevak’s influence), which I also thought was a nice touch of character development. One of Lenora’s before traits was that she was slow to learn and actually resisted learning when it was offered because she was too absorbed in wanting to do whatever she wanted in the moment, so it’s nice to see her growing out of that.

Posted on by TracyC

More Minds

More Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1996.

Since the last book in the series, Princess Lenora and Prince Coren have become engaged. Prince Coren has been living at Princess Lenora’s family’s castle in Gepeth while they get to know each other better and begin planning their future lives. Prince Coren appreciates the real and solid style of life in Gepeth, which is very different from his own country, where people use their special mental abilities to live in their imaginations, never creating anything real. Princess Lenora has calmed down somewhat since their last adventure, brought on by the alternate version of herself that she accidentally created because of her over-indulgence in using her special abilities to bring things that she imagines to life. All of the people in Gepeth have that ability, but Lenora’s abilities are especially strong. Also, everyone else in Gepeth controls their abilities more in order to maintain the common reality that they all share and prevent the state of reality from collapsing into chaos – what the people of Gepeth call “maintaining the Balance.” After seeing what the dark side of her own mind can do if not managed properly, Lenora has been limiting herself only to creating small things with her imagination, like special desserts for her and Coren to enjoy.

However, news comes that a giant has been attacking the land, and even though the people of Gepeth have tried to use their special mental abilities to make it go away, it seems immune to them. It sounds frightening, but Princess Lenora always craves excitement and insists that she be allowed to try to solve the problem. After her past escapades, her parents and others don’t fully trust Lenora, and they tell her that there’s no way that they’re going to let her try to deal with the giant. They even suspect that perhaps the giant is a figment of Lenora’s powerful imagination, run amuck again. Only, that isn’t the case, this time. Lenora is just as surprised as everyone else by the news, and she’s determined not to be left out of the excitement. While everyone else tries to think of some boring, sensible solution, impatient Lenora tries to work out a plan of her own that will allow her to have the adventure she craves.

The plan Lenora chooses is to create an alternate version of herself with her imagination. This double of her will stay with her parents and Coren, doing what she’s supposed to do and being bored, while the real Lenora sneaks out to go on a wonderful, exciting giant hunt. What could possibly go wrong? Seriously, Lenora, what could possibly go wrong after you discovered an evil alternate version of yourself in the last book, created by indulging the dark side of your imagination and your selfish, immature tendencies?

To be fair, Lenora quickly realizes her mistake when she creates an exact duplicate of herself and starts to worry that her duplicate might want to get rid of her and take over. She makes her duplicate disappear just in time, right before her duplicate tries it. (Nice going, Lenora. You’ve proven once again that you can’t really trust yourself.) Instead, Lenora decides to create a duplicate of herself who looks like her but has a very different personality, the sort of girl who enjoys the boring tasks her parents want her to take an interest in and all the minutia of the wedding planning. When Coren meets her double while talking to the man in charge of handling the wedding arrangements, he notices an immediate difference in her. For the first time, Lenora suddenly seems to care about things like pew ribbons and italics on wedding invitations. At first, he thinks that Lenora is being sarcastic about how exciting wedding planning is compared to chasing a giant, but a peek into her mind doesn’t reveal any sarcasm or duplicity from “Lenora”, something that really puzzles Coren. He becomes increasingly suspicious as Lenora’s out-of-character behavior increases, and she starts calling him by the pet name “Cori” and insists that he call her “Leni.” Lenora’s friend, the healer Lufa, has also noticed “Leni’s” odd behavior, but they are soon distracted when a tornado strikes the city.

All over the kingdom of Gepeth, strange things are happening that shouldn’t be happening. The Gepethians work hard all the time to keep their kingdom orderly and predictable, to “maintain the Balance.” Normally, they even control the weather. Mostly, the weather is wonderful, and because plants need watering, it rains every Sunday between two and six o’clock. They never have tornados, and few people have even read enough old books to know that word.

As Lenora journeys to find the giant, she also encounters unpredictable weather in the form of a snow storm. She is forced to seek shelter with a family of farmers, and none of them has any idea what the snow even is. Although the farmer’s wife has reservations about using their special gifts, both her husband and Lenora try to imagine the snow away and are unable to do it. Like the giant, it seems unaffected by their powers. After awhile, the snow suddenly disappears, but it’s one more sign that something is terribly wrong in Gepeth.

In fact, it’s not just Gepeth that’s in danger. In Coren’s home country, Andilla, where people live mostly in their imaginations instead of in the world as it really is, people are increasingly finding their thoughts and imaginings are getting scrambled. People fantasies are intruding on each other’s, and when Coren’s father attempts to communicate with Coren mentally, his thoughts get jumbled with someone thinking about cooking.

It seems that the Balance is out of balance everywhere, and the usual mental gifts that people use to keep the Balance are no longer effective.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I have to admit that I don’t have nearly as much patience with Lenora as I did when I read these books back in middle school. In the beginning, Lenora is impatient with everyone else for wanting to think before acting, like that’s a bad thing, but she also worries that, after their thinking, they’ll actually come up with a solution to the giant problem before she has an opportunity to get involved herself. Oh, noes! First, she thinks that thinking is bad, which is a sure sign of stupidity and that she has learned nothing from her previous misadventures, but also, she seems aware that this thinking that she hates is actually pretty likely to produce a solution. Lenora doesn’t really want to solve problems; she wants to enjoy them, and that’s a large part of her problem. For a young teenager, this attitude can be accepted as just part of Lenora’s character and taken to be just the catalyst for the rest of the adventure, but for an adult, it’s just a sign that Lenora never learns. She’s in her late teens, contemplating marriage and the future ruling of her kingdom, and she never learns. Deep down, she kind of seems to know better, but she doesn’t want to think. It’s maddening. Of course, part of that is because I can tell that the stories in this series kind of magnify “typical” teen traits of impulsiveness, rebelliousness, and lack of full understanding of the world and then put them into this fantasy setting. When I was young, I was more fascinated by the dynamics of Lenora’s world and figuring out how it worked than noticing the teen tropes, and now the teen tropes are annoying me. I’m actually more annoyed by the tropes and this sense I have that the authors probably expect adults to nod their heads and think, “typical teen” than I am by Lenora herself because I think that some of her behavior is that the authors set her up to be this cardboard cutout of a “typical teen” who sometimes goes wild with her powers than a fully developed character. I feel like her personality needs more depth and nuance.

Before the book is over, however, Lenora becomes a little more interesting as she has to deal with certain situations on her own, and she begins to see the sense in using her brain to solve problems, by thinking, not just impulsively pulling things out of her imagination. It’s partly when she accidentally creates a duplicate of Coren who is more physically brave and impulsive than the real Coren that she realizes the benefits of thinking things through before acting. She also comes to realize that some of what she thinks of as Coren’s “annoying habits” are actually positive traits. She occasionally wishes that Coren would worry less and be quicker to act, but after seeing what this opposite Coren is like, she comes to value the real Coren that much more. Fortunately, the second Coren, who likes to be called “Cori”, turns out to be a perfect match for “Leni.”

I thought that the relationship development between Coren and Lenora was good, although Lenora admits, even to herself, that she is deceiving him with her double, they are separated for part of the book. The two of them still love each other, even when they sometimes disagree or drive each other crazy. Coren understands Lenora, although he doesn’t agree with her, which is commendable. He knows that she craves adventure, excitement, and travel, all things that he could happily do without, preferring a more comfortable, settled life. He tries to explain to Lenora that, once the two of them are married, they will have the power to organize their lives together as they see fit. If Lenora wants to travel through the kingdom, dealing with problems and settling disputes, while Coren stays home and manages the life of the palace, he would be perfectly happy with that arrangement. It’s the opposite of what Lenora’s parents expect, wanting Lenora to tend to domestic matters and raising her future children, but as Coren points out, it’s more important that they arrange their lives and relationship in a way that suits the two of them and how they want to live. Lenora also comes to realize that she loves Coren being the person that he is, especially after meeting the incarnation of her fantasy about what Coren could be.

Overall, I often have the feeling that Coren is a more developed, nuanced character than Lenora. I think it’s partly because he is a more thoughtful person, and than gives him depth. He has now lived in two lands which are very different from each other, and it’s given him more perspective on the nature of reality and how people interact with it. He has not only seen different ways of living and experienced different ways of thinking, but he’s processed it and come to conclusions about it. That’s growth and character development. Lenora, on the other hand, has to be practically hit over the head by any situation in order to take it in and learn anything from it, and a large part of that is, unfortunately, plot device and the authors’ need to keep her in this impulsive, rebellious teen way of thinking.

That being said, this book does make it clear that Lenora is not the only person in their land who is dissatisfied with things being the way they are. People are unhappy and somewhat stressed because life in general has become entirely too predictable. People don’t travel to other places because they’re expected to be settled and enjoy the “perfect” conditions exactly where they are. They don’t see or experience new things during the general course of their lives. People don’t even control the names of their own children, which also seem to be granted to them as part of the “Balance.” It never even rains unexpectedly in Gepeth. Maintaining the “Balance”, the stable life that people in Gepeth know and value, involves strict control, but it seems that their control has gotten entirely too strict. Their efforts to avoid chaos have pulled things too much in the other direct, over-control, and over-control isn’t really “balanced.” Lenora thinks of her parents and the other leaders of their community as “bullies” for forcing people to live in a system where nobody is really happy. They try to explain to her why it’s necessary, but Lenora doesn’t want to listen until she sees for herself what the world is like with no Balance at all.

Too much chaos is the entire reason why Lenora’s people created the Balance in the first place. As Lenora and her friends try to unravel the mystery of why the Balance itself is falling apart, Lenora discovers that she herself is accidentally the cause of it. When she left the world that her alter ego had created in Grag leaderless in the last book, the people living there decided to try living in anarchy. It was fun for them for awhile, doing anything and everything they wanted with no rules, but then they discovered that they also had the power to make things they imagined become real. They used their powers, experimenting with them freely, and things got out of control. The chaos from Grag has since been spilling over to other worlds, disrupting their Balance. But, just as Lenora discovers that she is accidentally the cause of the problem, she also turns out to be the accidental solution to it.

Lenora gets to see what the world was like before the Balance was created. This is the book that implies that Lenora’s world is actually our world, but in the far distant future, after people evolved to have special mental abilities. When she goes to the past, a boy tells her that it’s the 21st century. Her past is our current time, which is also chaotic, but for very different reasons than in the book. The people in the 21st century have no control over their abilities, and the fabric of reality changes almost constantly because no one focuses on any one version of reality for any length of time and there is no agreement from anyone on what reality is or should be. In an odd way, I do find that appropriate for today’s conspiracy theory atmosphere. (For the umpteenth time, no, coronavirus is not man-made as a biological weapon in order to control people and make them “live in fear” like something an evil overlord from an ’80s cartoon would do, and it would be the world’s stupidest biological weapon if it was. Only an idiot would both create and release a biological weapon they didn’t already have a cure or vaccine for so they could make sure that they themselves didn’t get sick, and you’ll notice that no country or group of people has been spared. Releasing the disease first and vaccinating after would be like burning the village first and then looting it. Some things just have to be done in order, or they don’t work. I’m not impressed by this theory in any way, and I’m not going to be. I think people who make real biological weapons put more thought into it than people who make conspiracy theories. A person who really wanted to control others wouldn’t care so much whether or not they stayed in their homes but about what they were thinking and whether or not they had access to outside information, so it would be smarter for them to try to bring down the Internet or restrict access to it. Or maybe just use it to spread wild conspiracy theories to confuse people about the nature of reality or, better yet, help them to confuse themselves while avoiding responsibility for it. That’s also a form of control, manipulating people mentally and emotionally. Think about it.)

However, the past of Lenora’s world is like that if people had the actual ability to change reality for not only themselves but everyone else around them just by thinking something. Buildings constantly change shape there or turn into trees, and people become animals or wheels so they can just roll down the street. Sometimes, it rains candy, and sometimes, a giant worm destroys buildings. It’s pure chaos, and in the time that it takes for Lenora to notice each change, it suddenly changes again with someone’s next thought, leaving everyone unable to understand anything that’s going on or get any kind of grip on reality. (Personally, I would picture a world like this as being something like a physical version of absolutely everything that has ever appeared on the Internet without any moderator interference, but because this is a middle school level book, no one is naked or having sex in this world, at least not where Lenora can see it, thank goodness. There is a hint that people are definitively thinking about it, though, when everyone gets a peek into everyone else’s mind, and Lenora’s mother is appalled at some of the filthy things that people think.) In order to solve the problems with the world, Lenora has to reconcile her own feelings about the Balance and decide what sort of reality she would really prefer to live in. The fact is that people in this past world, where they could do and be absolutely anything they want whenever they want hasn’t made them happy. Part of the reason why things change so rapidly is that people discover that they’re not really happy with anything they create. No matter what it is, it’s never as good as what they originally imagined, it doesn’t change their emotions, and because the human imagination is limitless, they can always think of other possibilities to try that never turn out any better than what they did before and still leave them feeling unfulfilled … much like Lenora’s alter ego, Hevak, previously kept changing his/her perfect world because he/she never felt like she reached perfection in anything or like how Lenora’s creation of herself as the perfect princess she thought other people wanted is annoying and too absorbed with frivolous things or her fantasy of the perfect Coren turned out to be a dangerously rash bonehead because he never stops to think before he does anything. Maybe happiness isn’t really about getting everything you want (or think you might want) in the moment you want it but learning to stop and genuinely appreciate what you actually have. One 21st century person, reading Lenora’s mind, sees that she’s thinking exactly that and confirms that this is a problem. As exhilarating as Lenora finds this chaotic past, she begins to see the problems with it. It’s a very free place, but the truth is that it’s not perfect, either, by any stretch of the imagination.

In an ironic twist of fate and time loops (spoiler), it turns out that Lenora herself is the one who created the original Balance, producing the very world that she finds dull and stifling. When she was feeling overwhelmed by the chaos around her and even in her own mind, she conjured up a vision of home, and to her surprise, everyone liked it. It was the one world everyone could agree upon. It’s not perfect, and that still worries Lenora. At times, it’s overly controlled, and there is still room for improvement, but faced with that crazy, random chaos, it was a vast improvement. There was also some room in the Balance for people to gather in groups that wanted to do things in somewhat different ways, which is why people in different countries live in different ways or seems to have different mental abilities. The Balance feels rather controlling (especially to people who think like Lenora), but it does have some built-in flexibility. What Balance or Equilibrium or control feels like or requires is a little different everywhere, as each community interprets it, and there are some people who feel like misfits in their own land because they prefer the way other places do things, like how Coren really prefers the lifestyle in Gepeth to Andilla, where he was born. So, Lenora’s problems with the Balance might not be so much because Balance itself is a bad idea but that the way it’s implemented in Gepeth is a little too restrictive, and she would really prefer a slightly different type of Balance.

Because Lenora is kind of painted as this typical rebellious teen character, it seems that her acceptance of the concept of Balance stands for growing up and accepting adult responsibility and the rules and limits that come with it. When Lenora gets the chance to see inside her father’s head during the chaos, it turns out that he actually does feel the same way that she does about some things. He finds some of the processes involved in ruling boring and annoying, and he sometimes gets impulsive thoughts, like sending someone he doesn’t like to the bottom of the ocean. It’s just that, under normal circumstances, he doesn’t act on any of these thoughts or try to make them reality because he understands the heavy consequences that come with his actions and why it’s better to control his impulses. He understands the chaos that Lenora needs to experience for herself in order to understand the need for Balance. Lenora comes to realize that she does need some measure of control and stability after being confronted with a reality that is utter chaos. Like someone on an old episode of MASH said, “It’s easy to play the clown when you don’t have to run the circus.” Lenora likes excitement and a dash of chaos until everything is chaos, and she has to be the one to stop it and put things in order. But, I think that the book does pose questions and ideas that go far deeper than a teen learning to settle for some for the duller aspects of the adult world and responsibility. What is the real nature of reality? What level of control do we all really have in life, and how much do we really want? What do we really want our world to be?

Now, it’s possible that Lenora could still make some adjustments to the Balance. In the end, she still wants to do that. It’s possible that life in Gepeth could be a little less controlled. Maybe it doesn’t always need to rain on Sunday, or it could rain twice a week sometimes instead of once. Maybe a surprise rain storm could be fun, even if it does spoil your planned picnic because you end up staying inside and telling ghost stories with your friends and have more fun in an unexpected way. Maybe people could have some different names from the ones that they usually use and even come up with some better ones as well as a few that turn out hilariously bad. Maybe a dash of imperfection and unpredictability would make life a little close to feeling perfect … but maybe accepting that no version of life is ever completely perfect or makes everyone completely happy all the time might be the best way to start.

Everyone reading this lives in a world that is partially controlled by rules and limitations and is partially chaos, where things happen that nobody predicted and predictions are sometimes wrong. Is everyone here happy? Not everyone, and certainly, not all the time. In fact, much of the time, a lot of people aren’t particularly happy or entirely satisfied, even by our own personal decisions, which don’t always turn out the way we imagined they would when we made them. But, there are things, even in the middle of chaos or while dealing with the little rules and hassles of daily life, that are still good and make us feel happier. Life isn’t all great, but it’s not all bad, either. Sometimes, we get sudden shocks that lead us to rude awakenings, and sometimes, we’re pleasantly surprised. Everyone strives for balance in their own way, but whether or not we ever achieve perfect balance (we probably won’t), we could still appreciate some of the better things we do have and out own potential to improve. We can develop a kind of mental balance, even in an imperfect world.

Posted on by TracyC

Of Two Minds

Of Two Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1995.

Princess Lenora lives in a world where people can make things from their imaginations real just by thinking about them. This is a common “gift” that everyone in her country has, but the thing that really upsets Lenora is that people aren’t allowed to use their “gift” whenever they want to. Lenora’s parents are frequently upset with her for disrupting their calm, orderly world with her wild fantasies. They remind her that the reason why they have these rules was that their world was in chaos before people learned how to use their “gift”, and the chaos was only resolved when everyone agreed to maintain the same reality so they could all live in a safe, stable world that makes sense. They call this maintaining “the balance.” However, Lenora thinks that this stable world is boring and laments that there are never any technological developments or anything really interesting or exciting, like in the fantasy books she reads.

At this point, I pause to reflect that, in real life, we don’t have a world where people can change the nature of reality just by picturing something, and in spite of living every day in a common reality, our world still doesn’t completely make sense, people can have very different interpretations of things that are happening as if they lived in completely different realities of their own making, the idea that everyone could agree on one shared reality to create for any length of time sounds unbelievable, and when “exciting” things happen in world events, they are often not “interesting” or pleasant. Lenora is a teenage girl who doesn’t have a lot of experience yet in worlds that her people maintain in order to stay safe and sane or that she has not created herself and had control over. That’s about to change.

While everyone in Princess Lenora’s world has mental “gifts” that allow them to make imaginary things real, Lenora’s abilities are stronger than most, and her parents worry that her powers are getting much stronger. Lenora has trouble resisting the urge to imagine things and make them real, and although she loves doing it for the excitement and sense of power it gives her, it’s starting to scare her because it feels like her fantasies are starting to control her instead of her controlling them. Her fantasies have started to take darker turns, and frightening things are starting to become real, and she’s not even sure if they’re really coming from her mind or not. Because Lenora is turning seventeen years old, her parents are in the process of arranging a marriage for her to a prince from a neighboring kingdom, and they hope that marriage will help settle her down. However, Lenora isn’t so sure about the marriage or her increasingly difficult to control powers. When she talks to the healer, Lufa, about it, Lufa says that it’s not unusual for young people to experiment with their mental powers and that Lenora’s disturbing fantasies are coming from a dark part of her own mind that she will have to learn to control. She offers to spend some time working with Lenora and helping to develop her control.

Meanwhile, Prince Coren, Lenora’s betrothed, is having his own doubts about the impending wedding. In the first place, he thinks that he isn’t very handsome and isn’t sure that Lenora is going to like him. In the second place, he doesn’t really like change. Change makes him very nervous, although he doesn’t like the way things are in his kingdom and has felt for some time that things really need to change. People in his kingdom, like in Lenora’s, have special mental gifts, but they work in somewhat different ways. The people in Lenora’s kingdom, Gepeth, have the ability to change the nature of reality with their imaginations but often restrain their abilities in order to live in a common reality. In Coren’s kingdom, people have the ability to make things they imagine look and seem real, but they cannot actually change the nature of reality itself. They don’t bother to restrain their abilities at all, preferring to live in their imaginations. They don’t bother to keep their homes and buildings in good repair, just imagining that they live in opulent mansions and sleep in soft beds when their buildings are actually crumbling and they sleep on the ground. More than anything, Coren wants to build and enjoy something real instead of living in this imaginary world that he knows is not real at all. Also, Coren’s people have the ability to read each other’s minds, and they do it all time. The mostly talk to each other directly in their minds, not out loud or face to face, and they’re also in the habit of snooping and eavesdropping on each other’s thoughts. Coren tries not to be so obtrusive, and while his parents have some concerns about him marrying a girl who can’t speak mentally, Coren finds the idea a relief. Still, he’s not quite sure what to expect of Lenora or sure that she’s going to approve of him.

As Coren and his family approach Lenora’s kingdom, and he thinks and worries about meeting Lenora, he begins accidentally joining Lenora’s thoughts and fantasies. He begins getting a taste of what goes on in Lenora’s thoughts and imagination, and for a person who craves stability as much as he does, it’s unsettling.

It turns out that, although Lenora’s parents have mentioned marriage to her before, she has not been informed that her intended husband is on his way until he actually arrives. She is shocked and angry when her father suddenly springs Coren on her without warning, and Coren’s parents are dubious about this marriage when they discover that Lenora was not even informed that it was going to take place. They read the Lenora’s father’s mind and learn about Lenora’s previous antics with her powers. Coren begins having serious doubts about this marriage, and so do his parents, although they kind of admire Lenora’s imagination since they live in their imaginations much of the time.

Lenora, in a desperate panic to escape this unwanted marriage, tries to figure out what to do. She thinks about imagining a change in the world so that she won’t have to get married, but she knows that her father is still powerful enough to stop her. Then, she thinks about creating a world of her own with her imagination that she can jump into, but strangely, Coren ends up playing a role in everything she imagines. Even though she doesn’t want to like Coren, she feels strangely drawn to him. Since she can’t seem to escape thinking about Coren, she decides to physically run away and visit other countries, but she’s caught before she gets out of the palace.

Lenora’s father informs her that, because of her reckless behavior and increasing powers, they’ve arranged for her to marry Coren the very next day, and after their marriage, they will go to live on an island their kingdom controls with guards to prevent her from leaving or using her powers to escape. Lenora and Coren are to live on the island until after the birth of their second child, in the hopes that Lenora will settled down and get control of herself through her family responsibilities.

It seems like Lenora is trapped, but during the wedding ceremony, a portal to another world opens up. Lenora feels like someone, although she doesn’t know who, is offering her a chance at escape and decides to take it. However, as she goes through his portal, Coren tries to stop her, sensing that it’s dangerous, and he’s pulled in with her. The two of them find themselves in a world with an unknown creator, and for the first time in her life, Lenora’s powers don’t seem to work, so she can’t get them home. At first, Lenora is charmed by this seemingly perfect world full of interesting people and with the promise of newfound freedom. However, Coren is dubious and, although his powers are also gone, has the troubling feeling that they are in danger. What is this world, and who wants them there? If they’re ever going to return to their own world, they will have to face a dangerous enemy … and the darkest corners of Lenora’s own mind.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It’s the first book in a series.

My Reaction

I first read this book when I was in my early teens, back in middle school, and I think that’s the right age group for this book. Princess Lenora is a daydreamer, like many teenage girls, but unlike most teenage girls, she has the ability to make the things she daydreams about become reality with just a thought. It’s pretty normal for people to imagine all kinds of things, just as passing thoughts, even dark things. If Lenora lived in our world with fanfiction.net, FictionPress, and Wattpad and similar sites for amateur writers, my guess is that she’d be spending much of her time writing stories to post online, like fan fiction and creepypasta, and few people would think anything of it because she would have friends doing the same thing. In a few years, they would probably either graduate to newer sites, like Inkitt, start their own blogs, work on getting books published, or just get busy with their lives, college, and career and let the hobby go for awhile. Instead, because Lenora lives in a world where people’s imaginations change the shape of reality itself, Lenora’s unchecked imagination poses a real threat to people around her and the fabric of reality itself.

Lenora’s parents try to rush her into marriage and family life in the hope that it will curb her dangerous tendencies and teach her some self-control (like people getting married too young never backfires horribly) and get her over this self-insertion fantasy stage she’s in, but in a way, that’s exactly the problem. Many of Lenora’s fantasies, especially the dark ones are about control. I didn’t think of that much when I first read the book as a young teenager. Mostly, I just liked the concept of a world where people could change reality just by thinking about things and the exploring the concept of what that ability could lead to. Much of the story is about that, but also, many of Lenora’s darkest fantasies are about power and control, things that she both resists in her daily life and craves for herself. A lot of teenage rebellion is about control – who has power over whom and where the boundaries lie.

Teenagers are at that phase of life where they’re almost legal adults. Physically, they can do most of the things that full adults can do, like drive cars and get themselves around town to go places they want to go, but yet, they can’t legally consent to certain things, and they’re still required to ask their parents’ permission before making even basic decisions about their weekend plans, and their parents are often telling them what they think they should do for their futures in the way of jobs and education. It can be a frustrating experience, knowing that you have the ability to go out, have adventures, and explore what life has to offer but yet not really being allowed to get out there and do things. There are practical reasons why teenagers can’t act on every whim that enters their heads. For one thing, life requires money. There are few things that don’t cost anything, and you need some time to build resources. For another, people won’t hire you for just any job because you showed up and said you wanted to try it. Most jobs require a certain level of education and/or experience, and teenagers just haven’t had time to acquire it yet. They have to find lesser jobs first and continue their education or get some professional training. Also, when it comes to marriage and other deeply personal decisions, there are serious life consequences to the choices you make. Adults hope by making young people wait for things and build their lives gradually, they’ll get a better sense of who they are, the lives they want to lead, and the consequences of the decisions they’ll make. It doesn’t always work because I’ve seen even older adults make some pretty weird decisions, but that’s largely the goal.

People have a tendency to try to control those who don’t seem to have the ability or desire to control themselves, and that’s really the phase that Lenora is in. Lenora’s young powers are growing, and she wants to test them and see what she can do with them, to explore her deepest thoughts and express herself and make her mark on the world, but her parents and the society she lives in actually can’t let her do that as much as she wants because of what it would do to everyone around her and the very world they live in. Most people, teenagers or not, have some private thoughts or fantasies that they would never want to share with the world, but Leonora’s fantasies become the world around her. They don’t stay private because they don’t stay only in her mind. When Lenora’s fantasies come to life, she pulls real people into them, giving them a genuine stake in having some say over them and trying to limit or stop them. It’s not just that she disrupts people’s lives and inconveniences them, but she can put them in very real danger and actually poses a threat to their very existence. Lenora doesn’t fully consider what her flights of fantasy do to other people, such as when she temporarily sends her mother into a gray void at the beginning of the book so she can pretend that she has the family’s castle to herself or when she briefly considers a fantasy where her parents would be living in poverty at her mercy and charity so she could control them instead of the other way around, until she finds herself at the mercy of someone she can’t control. Sometimes, people don’t understand what they put others through until they have to live it themselves. You’d think, with as much of an imagination as Lenora has, she could put herself in someone else’s place, but she doesn’t develop that kind of empathy until she sees what it’s like to deal with a person who completely lacks it.

If Lenora could have a creative outlet for her energies, getting her ideas out on paper, writing stories to share, or exploring her visions through art, her life would be different, and she probably would feel less frustration. The purpose of imagination and daydreaming are to let people explore concepts and consider different things that might happen, both good and bad, without acting anything out in the real world. It gives people a chance to think things through and consider what could happen without risking bad consequences from actually doing anything. I’m not a very adventurous person in real life. I don’t like camping or hiking, I’m afraid of heights, and there are things that I actually can’t do physically. But, I don’t mind vicariously experiencing things through stories, where I can have a safe kind of adventure. However, Lenora has that problem where, if she imagines things too hard, they become real. Her people call it a “gift”, and she doesn’t always see it as a problem, but it really is because it removes that important safety net between thinking and acting, and when Lenora’s darker thoughts take over, it poses a danger to everyone. Since Lenora has fantasy books that she likes to read, it does seem like her people have a sense of creative writing and the arts, and there are times when Lenora considers things that she could make real but doesn’t, so her people can apparently control their thoughts enough to pick and choose what to make real and what to leave as fiction. It seems that Lenora does have the option of writing stories as a creative outlet, but this craving for a sense of power and control and the ability to make some real change in the world are what keep Lenora from just writing fan fiction and tempt her to play with the nature of reality itself.

Spoiler:

The spoiler for this story is that Lenora’s greatest enemy is another version of herself, the dark version from the back of her mind who can’t be controlled, who doesn’t care about other people, and insists on getting everything his way. (Lenora’s dark version is a man, the idea being that this Lenora turned herself into something completely opposite to what she used to be in order to have a more powerful image.) What Lenora and Coren both need to find is the Balance that Lenora’s society tries so hard to maintain. She comes to have more respect for the people and worlds that she has created, seeing them as real beings with feelings instead of playthings to be cast aside when she becomes bored of them.

Coren also turns out to be a nice counterpart to Lenora. In the beginning, all he wants is a safe, stable, comfortable life in the real world instead of the world of imagination, where his parents live. In the end, he realizes that he needs to find a balance between the two himself. Although Lenora’s imagination is what gets them into trouble, he comes to realize that not all of what she created is bad. Lenora (and even her dark side) comes up with genuinely good ideas. Coren’s praticality and Lenora’s flair for adding a dash of excitement and color to life complement each other well, and in the end, they decide that they love each other. They would make good life partners because of their ability to bring out positive traits in each other and provide some balance to each other’s lives, but the book ends with them deciding that they want to get to know each other better before actually getting married, which is a practical thought.

Posted on by TracyC

In the Circle of Time

In the Circle of Time by Margaret J. Anderson, 1979.

This is the second book in the In the Keep of Time Trilogy. There are a couple of characters from the first book that appear in this one, but most are new.

Robert lives on his family’s farm outside of a small town in Scotland.  He loves to draw, but his father doesn’t think much of Robert’s art.  He wants Robert to take over the family farm when he’s grown, especially since Robert’s older brother, Duncan, disappeared two years earlier.  Everyone assumes that Duncan just got tired of the farm and ran off to the city to find work, but Robert has trouble believing that.  Duncan always loved Robert and looked after him, and Robert can’t believe that Duncan would just run off without even telling him.

One day, Robert goes to the ancient circle of stones that stands near his town, known as the Stones of Arden, to draw before school.  There, he happens to meet Jennifer, an American girl who has recently moved to the area because her father is working in the nearby city.  Jennifer has an interest in archeology, and she points out to Robert that there are depressions where there used to be stones in the middle of the circle that aren’t standing anymore.  She persuades Robert to help her do a little digging to see if they can find them.  As they dig, a strange fog comes in, and Jennifer sees a vision of dark-haired people also digging.  However, no one is really there because the ground where they were digging is undisturbed.  Robert doesn’t see the people, but he believes Jennifer when she tells him what she saw.  There are a lot of strange stories about the stones, and Robert has heard many of them from his grandfather.

Jennifer, although spooked by what she saw, refuses to believe any superstitious stories.  She persuades Robert to come back to the stones with her so that she can take another look at them.  However, when they do, the strange fog comes, and the kids suddenly find themselves many years in the future.

The kids learn where (or when) they are when they meet a boy named Karten, who was digging in the spot where Jennifer had seen him digging in her earlier vision.  He tells them that the year is 2179 (two hundred years after the book was written).  The kids can suddenly hear the sound of the ocean from the stones when they couldn’t before, and when they ask about it, Karten tells them that the polar ice caps melted in the 21st century, raising the level of the ocean and bringing the water much closer to the stones.

The future is a harsh place, and Karten fears the people he calls “the Barbaric Ones.”  The Barbaric Ones are people from “across the sea” who, as Karten and his people explain, “have retained the ways of people who lived long ago. They are interested in wealth and machines and factories.” The problem is that resources are in short supply, so the Barbaric Ones kidnap people to use as slaves, gathering as much of the scarce resources as they can to sustain their standard of living.  Karten and his people don’t want to fight the Barbaric Ones if they can avoid it because they have lost people who tried to fight them and because they believe in the values of love and trust above all.

Jennifer is quick to insist that she and Robert return to the stones where they entered this strange and disturbing future, but Robert persuades her to stay awhile and meet more of Karten’s people. Karten particularly tells them about an older woman who told him before about other people from the past who came to their time (the kids from the first book in the series), and Robert is hopeful that this woman will not only be able to tell them how to get home but maybe also what happened to his brother, Duncan. Robert has started to suspect that when Duncan suddenly disappeared, he may have come to the this time period the same way he and Jennifer did and may still be there.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction:

I don’t generally go in for dystopian novels because I find them depressing. The real world has enough problems without trying to imagine new and worse ones. However, I do find it interesting that this book, which was written a few years before I was born, has a vision of the future that specifically addresses things that are of major concern to people in the early 21st century. It imagines that the polar ice caps have melted and the sea level has risen. Many of the old coastal cities are gone, and there are new cities and communities in areas where there weren’t before.

Because of what’s happened, the world’s population has separated into two parts that have different ways of coping with the situation. The “Barbaric Ones” are much more technology-oriented, but what makes them barbaric is the way they exploit other people to serve their purposes and support the lifestyle that they want to maintain, which is much harder to maintain in this new future. Karten’s people, on the other hand, have developed a more old-fashioned, communal style of living. In fact, it’s unusually communal, to the point where young children are raised collectively by the adults of the community, nobody really knowing or caring about who their birth parents are. When children are nine years old, they select families they want to join, usually because of similar interests they have, and are raised as children of that family. Karten also likes art, and so he joined a family of artists.

These two types of societies are extreme in their views and lifestyles, polar opposites of each other, and neither is really the sort of society that Jennifer or Robert want to be part of. Jennifer is unnerved that people in Karten’s society don’t really know or care who their parents are and just kind of pick families for themselves without attachment to their birth parents. It just seems unnatural to her. Karten explains that their view is that children belong to the community as a whole. If everyone is part of the same big community, what does it matter who they live with? Their concept of marriage or partnership is never fully explained, but there don’t seem to be any rules or even social conventions about who can live with whom. One girl, called Lara Avara, tells Jennifer that her chosen parental figures/mentors are a pair of women, which surprises Jennifer, who thinks of family in terms of mothers and fathers, one of each per family. However, the future people have a different concept of family that seems to be centered more around sharing personal interests, with no particular conventions around how the family should be shaped. The chosen parental figures/mentors raise the younger members who chose to join their family, teaching them skills and professions they have mastered, according to their interests. It is not explained in the story if these older women are or were married or lovers, and it doesn’t seem to be important to any of the characters in the story, either. Lara Avara just tells Jennifer, “There cannot be rules deciding whom you love and from whom you learn.” I see one disadvantage to not knowing who one’s parents and full-blooded siblings are because there would be no way to ensure against incest, which is worrisome because that tends to bring out certain genetic health problems and weakens the genetic pool of the community, especially if it goes on for generations (unless this society has thought of that and just doesn’t mention their solution during the course of the story – maybe the elders of the community who remember who has the same birth parents and who doesn’t will intervene if siblings try to match up with each other). In some ways, Robert is attracted to this style of life because it would make things easier for him. In his own time, his family undervalues his artistic gifts and his unpleasant, temperamental father forces him to do hard physical labor on the family farm. There are times when Robert would love to exchange his problematic family for one that would help him hone his craft and appreciate his personal talents.

For awhile, Jennifer worries that Robert likes these future people so much that he wants to stay there, and she’ll be stuck in the future with him. Unlike Robert, Jennifer is close to her family and happy in their time, and she wants to go home. The two of them are accidentally separated from each other when a character from the previous book in the series (Ollie) brings Robert back to their own time without Jennifer, through the tower that the previous set of characters had used for their time travels. As Robert figures out how to rescue Jennifer from the future, he discovers the truth about Duncan, who has not traveled through time at all (although it looked like that was the way the story was going to go) but really did run away from home, as people thought he did. Like Robert, Duncan was also unhappy about their home life. Although Duncan is better suited to the farm work than Robert, he also found life there stifling, constantly having to work for their father and deal with his angry moods. Their father’s attitude problems are what makes the farm life difficult for both boys, and Duncan also seems to have been feeling overworked and unappreciated. Although life as a teenage runaway has been difficult for Duncan, he has at least managed to find work (paid, unlike the farm work he was doing for his father, and payment is a monetary form of appreciation as well as providing the worker with a living) and the freedom to begin building a life of his own.

Rescuing Jennifer means returning to the stone circle where their time travels began. After Jennifer returns home to their time, she and Robert talk about their experiences. They feel badly that they were not able to help the future people more with their problems and dangers, but Robert says that maybe what’s important is what they’ve learned from the experience themselves and how it’s changed them. Their problems (just like Robert’s brother, Duncan) have always been in their own time, and they have to live their lives in the present. What they do in the present may also change the future and help make it a better place. By the end of the book, Duncan returns to his family’s farm to tell his parents that he’s all right. Duncan will not work on the farm again, as he once did, but he decides to take a new job nearby and help out on the weekends, which will make things easier for Robert. Their family has some healing to do. A talk with Robert’s grandfather also reveals that other members of Robert’s family have traveled through time in the stone circle, and although Robert’s grandfather did his time traveling many years earlier, the vision he got of the future was actually after Robert and Jennifer’s adventures. They can tell that it was further along in time by the people and things he saw, and it reassures them that their future friends will be all right in spite of everything.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

The Case of the Weeping Witch

The Case of the Weeping Witch by E. W. Hildick, 1992.

This is one of the McGurk fantasy mystery books.

The kids are studying the history of their New England town in school. McGurk studies witchcraft trials, and he is outraged at how innocent people could be charged with witchcraft on little evidence and sentenced to death. When their teacher tells them that she has learned that a young girl was once put on trial for witchcraft in their town 300 years ago, McGurk convinces the others to try to use their “little black boxes” from the previous book in the series to go back in time and try to save the girl.

The girl, Hester Bidgood, is thirteen years old and turns out to be the goddaughter of Gwyneth, one of their friends from their last fantasy adventure. Gwyneth is now very old, but she remembers them and welcomes them into her home. A man in their community, Jacob Peabody, is trying to pressure Gwyneth into selling him her property. He is the one who brings charges of witchcraft against Hester. Hester calls herself an “investigatrix,” meaning that she is a detective, like the kids in the McGurk organization. She knows some disreputable things that Peabody has done, and Peabody wants to keep her quiet as well as force Gwyneth to give up her property. The McGurk organization is determined to save Hester, but they must be careful not to make anyone think that they might also be witches.

Of course, that turns out to be difficult because all of the modern-day members of the McGurk Organization have magical black boxes.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Spoiler:

Hester has a friend called Rob McGregor who was captured and raised by Indians when he was young. Although he now lives with his grandparents, he still has habits and skills that he learned from the Indians, and Hester likes to call him by his Indian name, Blazing Scalp (because of his red hair). I expected that Rob would turn out to be some ancestor of McGurk’s, just like the last book had a definite McGurk ancestor, because he has that distinctive red hair, but if there’s a connection, it isn’t definite.

Rob knows that Hester has learned that Peabody earned his fortune by cheating at cards and that he is hiding a mysterious guest in his house. Rob saves Hester when the people in the town try to conduct the water trial, seeing whether she will float or sink in water to determine whether or not she is a witch. Then, Rob and Hester hide in Rob’s secret lodge in the swamp while the McGurk organization tricks the man hiding in Peabody’s house into revealing himself.

The man, who has been going by the name Mica Holroyd, is really Matthew Hopkins, a former witch hunter who has been charged with witchcraft himself and is now a fugitive from the law. Once everyone in town realizes that Peabody is dishonest and harboring a fugitive, they know that the charges against Hester were false. Peabody and Hopkins are both sent back to England, never to return. When the McGurk organization returns to its own time, they learn that Rob and Hester eventually married and that the town gave Hester property that used to belong to Peabody as compensation for accusing her of witchcraft. Hester started a home for orphans and elderly people, which is now a retirement community in the kids’ town.

There is another book in the series which focuses on Rob and Hester alone, without the members of the McGurk Organization.

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

The Case of the Dragon in Distress

The Case of the Dragon in Distress by E. W. Hildick, 1991.

The McGurk organization start getting interested in the Middle Ages when they acquire a round table, which reminds them of King Arthur’s Round Table, and they begin studying the Middle Ages in school. Shortly after that, Brains buys a set of walkie-talkies at a fire sale. At first, they don’t work, but Brains tinkers with them until he can get them to send and receive. The strange thing is that they only seem to work well at night.

One night, the organization decides to test them, and somehow, they are transported into the Middle Ages. A strange voice speaks to them through their “little black boxes” and sends them on a quest that takes them to the castle of Princess Melisande the Bad. The castle is supposedly guarded by a dragon, but it is really a couple of servants in a dragon costume. Like many others in the castle, they are prisoners of Princess Melisande, who appears young and sweet, but is actually evil. She uses the dragon story to lure brave men to the castle so that she can imprison them and drink their blood. She has leeches put on them, and then she eats the leeches. That is how she maintains her youth, even though she is ancient. Among her prisoners are the king’s son, Prince Geoffrey, and the young chief of the McGurk clan from Ireland, who may be a distant ancestor of Jack P. McGurk.

When the members of the McGurk Organization arrive at the castle, everyone is amazed by their strange appearance, modern clothes, and the little black boxes that talk. Even Princess Melisande is in awe of them, but the McGurk in her prison is weakening, and she may be planning to replace him with the McGurk from modern times.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoiler:

The two servants who were pretending to be the dragon, Gareth and his sister Gwyneth, are also time travelers, but they are from the 17th century. They were brought to the Middle Ages after drinking a potion that was supposed to cure them of a fever. In their own era, they live close to the castle where they are now imprisoned, and they know that there is a secret passage that leads out of the castle from the dungeon. The kids develop a plan to sneak out of the castle under the dragon costume, but they are caught and thrown in the dungeon. They try the secret passage, not knowing if the path goes all the way through. It does, and they make it to the king’s camp. When they tell the king that Princess Melisande has his son, the king plans to storm the castle and free the prisoners. McGurk says that their mission is accomplished, and the voice from their little black boxes says that it’s time for them to go home. Everyone wakes up in their own beds, as if nothing had happened. They believe that the walkie-talkies are responsible for what happened, but they aren’t quite sure if they actually went back in time or merely dreamed that they did. There is some evidence that they really went back in time, but it isn’t answered definitely.

I liked this book as a kid, although it’s a little bizarre because most of the books in this series are just mysteries involving a group of neighborhood friends that take place contemporary to when the books were written. There is usually nothing magical or supernatural about the books in this series, and it’s kind of a weird departure from the usual format. There is another book after this one that continues their time traveling adventures.

Posted on by TracyC

The Key to the Indian

The Key to the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks, 1998.

This is the final book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. At the end of the previous book, Omri’s father learned the secret of Omri’s special cupboard and key, that it brings small plastic figures to life.

At the beginning of this book, Omri’s father suddenly announces to his family that he wants to take them on a camping trip. It seems like an impulsive decision because this isn’t something that the family usually does, and Omri figures that it must have something to do with the secret that the father and son now share concerning their small friends from the past.

After Omri’s father discovered his secret, the two of them had a serious talk, and Omri explained to him all about his past adventures and the very real consequences that they’ve had, both in the present and in the past. They need to consider carefully what they’re going to do because Little Bear has asked them for help with some trouble that his tribe in the past is having with the British. Knowing the history of the interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, both Omri and his father know that something serious is about to happen to Little Bear and his people, but how can they help? Omri explains to his father that they have the ability to go back into the past themselves, but in order to do that, they need to find something big enough to hold both of them, and someone else would have to turn the key for them to send them and bring them back.

Omri’s father later admits to him privately that he thought up the camping trip as a way for the two of them to disappear for a couple of days without anyone asking questions. Although he proposed the camping trip, he plans to arrange for him and Omri to have a private trip by themselves, discouraging the others from going along. Omri’s father also thinks that he’s figured out what they can use to send themselves back in time – the family car. It’s big enough to hold both of them, it locks with a key, and there’s even an LB in the license plate number, which they take as a hopeful sign. But then, Omri realizes that there’s a problem with that scheme. Even though the car locks with a key, it’s not the kind of lock that an old-fashioned skeleton key could open. They need a key with a different shape, something flatter. They decide that they need the help of Jessica Charlotte, who made the last key. Fortunately, Omri has a way to talk to her because he has the plastic figure of Jessica Charlotte.

When Omri brings Jessica Charlotte back, he finds that she has attempted to drown herself in a river (an event hinted at in the last book) because of her guilt at accidentally causing her sister’s husband’s death. Omri brings back a WWII Matron who has helped them before to treat Jessica Charlotte. When Jessica Charlotte recovers, she thinks at first that she must have died and that Omri is part of her afterlife. Omri assures her that it’s not the case, that she’s still alive. She is still lamenting over having caused Matt’s death and ruined her sister and niece’s lives, but Omri explains to her that he’s Lottie’s grandson. Jessica Charlotte feels better, hearing that Lottie grew up, married, and had children, so her life wasn’t completely ruined. Omri can’t bring himself to explain how Lottie was killed in a bombing during WWII, but he asks for her help to create a new key. Aunt Jessie, as she asks to be called, agrees to help Omri, and he and his father give her their car key to duplicate.

However, when Aunt Jessie returns with the key, they realize that they’ve miscalculated. When a person comes from the past with anything they make or bring with them, it’s always small, like the miniature people themselves. Aunt Jessie’s key is a duplicate of the key they gave her, but it’s small, too small to use in the car. Omri and his father aren’t sure how to get around this problem, so they decide to go on the camping trip with Omri’s brother Gillon, just camping like normal, while they think it over.

It turns out that something magic happened to the car key while it was in the past with Aunt Jessie. When Omri’s father turns the key in the car, Omri suddenly finds himself in the past, but not the past he was hoping to visit. Because they brought some things that belonged to his Great-Grandfather Matt with them on the camping trip, Omri suddenly finds himself in India, during the time that Matt was living there. Omri is inside a puppet in a marketplace, and his great-grandfather buys him. Also, to Omri’s shock, Gillon is also inside a puppet that his grandfather has.

Their mother eventually rescues them by opening the car and turning the key. She was alarmed because it seemed like her husband and sons all passed out in the car. Omri and his father don’t have a real explanation for her, not wanting to explain that the car key is now magic. (She decides that there must have been an exhaust leak, and they were all overcome by fumes.) Gillon was knocked unconscious when his puppet was dropped on its head, and his mother takes him to the hospital, using her spare car key. (When Gillon recovers, he thinks it was just a weird dream he had because of the car fumes.) Meanwhile, Omri and his father talk about the situation, and Omri’s father reveals that, while the boys were taken to India, he ended up in Little Bear’s time because he was carrying some wampum belonging to Little Bear.

So, know they know that it’s possible for them to use their car key to go back in time, but if they try it a second time, who will turn the key for them to bring them back at the appropriate time? The only other person who can come with them on their “camping trip” who knows their secret and can be trusted to help them is Omri’s friend, Patrick. However, Patrick isn’t happy that he’s only there to help Omri and his father go back in time and that he won’t be going himself. He does agree to help them, but unfortunately, he has plans of his own while Omri and his father are occupied elsewhere.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction:

Although Omri’s father wonders at first whether it’s a good idea to try to help Little Bear because of the risk of changing the past and affecting the future, Omri has learned that it’s not quite as simple as that. During his previous adventures, he has felt an irresistible pull to use the cupboard and the key, even when he wasn’t always sure it was a good idea, and there are indications that Omri’s interactions with people in other time periods seem fated to happen. He did save Jessica Charlotte’s life when she tried to drown herself, and other things Omri has done seem to fit with wider events.

When Omri and his father are figuring out how to help Little Bear with his problems with the British in his time, they do some research about Little Bear’s time and talk about the ways that 18th century British people treated Native Americans. Knowing what Little Bear is likely to face, they feel like they have a responsibility to help him as best they can. When Little Bear explains in more detail what his people have been suffering at the hands of the British and other settlers, Omri feels guilty, knowing that he’s also British, while at the same time knowing that he was not responsible for things that happened before he was born. This is something that people still struggle with today, hearing about difficult periods of history and knowing that their ancestors (or at least other members of their society, if not literally their direct ancestors) played a role in making life difficult for others, setting up situations where real people suffered or were killed. The best Omri can do is to help Little Bear make the best possible decisions to ensure the survival of his people. Of course, being able to help with that much is part of the time traveling fantasy of this story. Real people can’t actually go back in time and intervene to influence others and change the course of history.

The books in this series aren’t for young children, and as the series progresses, they get more serious in subject matter. There is discussion of suicide, not just with Jessica Charlotte’s attempt to drown herself but when Little Bear explains that his first wife killed herself after being raped by white men. There is violence in the story when the Native American village is attacked and people are shot. Overall, the story is pretty straight-forward in the way in confronts the dark sides of history. Omri and his father advise Little Bear to take his clan to a place where they know that they will be relatively safe and among other Iroquois, but they know and admit to Little Bear that even that won’t solve all of their problems and that there will be other hardships in the future. It’s an imperfect solution to a massive problem, but Omri senses that it is best choice that they could make and that Little Bear and his family will live the safest possible life because of the decision they made, and their descendants will survive.

Omri and his father struggle with knowing that things are going to be hard for Little Bear’s people no matter what choices they make. There is no magical solution to everyone’s problems in the story, and the book doesn’t offer a firm moral or solution to Omri’s guilty feelings when he sees firsthand how badly Native Americans were treated (a form of “white guilt“, although the book doesn’t use that term). Overall, I would say that the book confronts the dark parts of history and human guilt on a very individual level. Omri and his father can’t solve the large issues completely because they can’t control them. They can’t control the past, and they can’t control other people, not even the people who come through the cupboard as miniature ones, like living toys. Everyone is an individual with their own choices to make, and every choice, even the wrong ones, changes the course of history.

After Omri saves Jessica Charlotte’s life, she realizes that what she thought was a dream before she stole her sister’s earrings was real, that she saw and spoke to Omri, and that he could have warned her about what would happen if she went through with her theft, how Matt would have died and how everyone’s lives would be changed for the worse. However, Omri did choose not to warn her because not everything was changed for the worse. After Lottie’s father died and her family lost their money, Lottie still grew up, fell in love, got married, and had a daughter. It’s true that she did die young in World War II, while her daughter was still an infant, and changing the theft of the earrings might have changed that in some way, but not without changing other things. Omri has discovered that changing things about the past, even seemingly small things, can change larger parts of history, and his psychic gift seems to guide him toward making only choices that help the flow of history instead of working against it. If he had prevented the theft of the earrings, his great-grandfather might have lived longer and so might Lottie, but if that happened, would Lottie have ever met the man she eventually married and had Omri’s mother? Omri’s father wouldn’t be happy without his wife and sons, and if Omri never existed, would some of the other things he did that impacted history have happened? Also, if Lottie hadn’t died in the bombing during WWII, would someone else have been where she happened to be and died in her place? The bomb that killed her would have fallen anyway because that was part of someone else’s choices, a person who never enters this story and whose decisions can’t be controlled. Time and history and the ripple effects caused by individual choices are complex. Omri has his psychic gift to guide him, and even his father, who admits that he never used to believe anything he couldn’t see for himself, comes to trust it.

People without this sort of magical gift have only themselves to rely on to make the best choices they can to make the world as good as possible, even in the face of others’ bad decisions. I think that a large part of the choices that Omri makes in the story and dealing with “white guilt” in real life come down to the combination of frustration and the acceptance of choices made by other people who can’t be controlled. Modern people might hate what happened in the past and feel badly if people related to them were part of it, but we don’t have the option to change things that have already happened. There comes a point where you have to accept the knowledge that you can’t control others, no matter how much you might want to make better choices on their behalf. The only person you can control is yourself.

I’m a white person, descended from colonial settlers in America, and I don’t actually see “white guilt” as a negative thing. I see it as a human thing. If you can feel real emotion at someone else’s plight, a wish that bad things didn’t really happen, or a feeling that what happened shouldn’t have happened and an honest desire to change even the unchangeable past for the better, it means that you’re a real, thinking, feeling human being with a sense of right and wrong, and there’s nothing bad about that at all. Feelings are just tools, to give us hints of what we need to do or how we need to behave in our lives. Feelings aren’t always completely accurate, but sometimes, they give us hints of things that need to be fixed or clues that whatever we did before didn’t really work, that we made the wrong choice or did the wrong thing. I think what upsets and confuses other white people about “white guilt” is the conflict between loving ancestors and wanting to be proud of them and admitting that some of them had a real dark side and did some pretty awful things. Some people have trouble dealing with that, thinking that it’s impossible to feel two things at once, loving someone and being angry with them for things that they’ve done, but it really is possible. Two things can be true at once, and you can have mixed feelings about many things.

Feelings are complex, as complex as people are, and I think it’s as possible for a person to both like and hate another person for the things they’ve done as it is to both like a sweater for the way it looks but not want to wear it because it’s itchy and uncomfortable. I think that’s about the best advice that I can actually offer to other white people trying to make sense of that feeling. Sure, that sweater looks pretty impressive. It has a nice color and a cheerful pattern, and you might think it would look impressive on you if you wore it, but honestly, it’s better if you just leave it on the mannequin. It’s overpriced, out of style, and won’t look at all impressive when it makes you constantly want to scratch all of the places where it itches. Let it go.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”

The Serenity Prayer

The frustrating thing about feelings about the past and about other people’s lives is that we can’t fix those particular things. In real life, we can’t go back in time, and we can’t even “fix” other people in our own time because that’s something they have to do themselves, if they’re going to do it. You can suggest things to other people, but there’s always a point where they have to make the decisions themselves. But, the good news is that, if you can’t control other people, nobody can completely control you! The way I see it, the most useful thing about this “white guilt” is remembering that this is something we don’t want. Maybe there’s something charming about the rosy, nostalgic view of the past, but honestly, you wouldn’t be happy living there, and if you actually had to live with your ancestors, you’d probably discover that you wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things and maybe wouldn’t even get along at all. So, why would you want to try to carry their old baggage with you into your life and spend your life and your precious time constantly trying to explain or excuse their bad choices? You’ve got your own to life.

Give credit where credit is due for both the good and the bad things, and let our ancestors’ records speak for themselves. You won’t accomplish anything for twisting your feelings into knots for trying to protect the feelings of the dead and justify their actions. They don’t even feel anything anymore. They are dead. Let them rest. We don’t want to add to bad things that have been done in the past and to keep having things in our lives to feel guilty about, and that’s okay because there are new choices to be made every single day. Put your focus there. You have a present to live and a future to plan. Knowing about the past is interesting and informative, but the past isn’t where we really live. Admire it like a nice sweater on a mannequin, take note of the price tag, and move on. We don’t have to make the same old choices that have made people, including ourselves, unhappy just because that’s the way things have been before or because we feel like we have something to prove about our ancestors. They had their chance to make the choices in their time, for good or bad (and frequently, some of each, but you can’t help that), and now, it’s our turn to make the choices because this is our time.

Speaking of bad decisions, Patrick almost gets Boone and Ruby killed because of his recklessness when he brings them back while Omri and his father were with Little Bear, which he did just because he was bored and felt left out of their magical adventure, which wasn’t really pleasant and fun for them anyway. Boone and Ruby both make it clear how they feel about that, and Omri also makes it clear that this is the end of the magic for him and Patrick. Boone and Little Bear have their own lives to live, and Omri’s gift tells him that it’s time to let them get on with living their lives without interference. Omri still has the cupboard and the key, but he no longer feels the pull he felt before to use them because he has played his part in history and in the lives of his little friends, and there is nothing more he needs to do. He doesn’t feel the need to lock these things away as he did before because he already knows that he will never feel the urge to use them again. When something’s over and the moment has passed, you just know.

Before the end of the story, Omri’s mother admits to him that she knows all about the little figures and that the cupboard brought them to life, although she never actually saw any of them herself. She has also inherited the family gift and is aware of what the cupboard does, even though she has not used it herself. All along, she’s been pretending that she didn’t know what was going on, although she really did. She’s a little sorry that she didn’t see the little people herself, but she knew that not interfering was the right thing to do. She thinks that letting the magic go and not using the cupboard again are the right decisions, and she doesn’t want Omri or his father to tell Omri’s bothers about the magic because, if they do, it will never end, and it’s really time for it to all end. This really is the final book in the series.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Cupboard

The Mystery of the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, 1993.

This is the fourth book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. It’s also the longest book in the series and the one that reveals the most about the history of the magical key and cupboard and how their secrets tie into the secrets in Omri’s own family. It was my favorite book in the series when I was a kid!

Omri’s parents have surprised him by telling him that they’re planning on moving to a new house again. Omri wasn’t exactly happy with their last move, and his room and other parts of their new house were damaged after his last adventure with time travel, when his friend Patrick brought back a tornado with him. However, now that the house has been repaired and he’s settled in, Omri doesn’t like the idea of having to pack up and leave and get used to a new place again. His parents want to move to the country, but it’s not even the area where Patrick now lives. Instead, they’re planning to move to a house that his mother has just inherited.

The house Omri’s mother has inherited belonged to an older cousin of hers she never actually knew. He didn’t leave his house specifically to her; it’s just that he died and left no will, and Omri’s mother happens to be the nearest living relative his lawyers could find. When they finally see the house and find out how much land is attached to it, it turns out to be much better than Omri expected.

There are just two things that concern Omri. The first is the package that he asked his father to store at a bank for him – the magical cupboard and key. Although Omri asked his father to put them in a bank deposit box to keep them safe and prevent himself from being tempted to use them again because it’s too dangerous, he doesn’t like the idea of them being too far away from where he’s living. His father promises to have them transferred to a bank near their new home. The second thing that worries him is that his cat mysteriously disappears soon after they move into the new house. (The cat is okay, she just sneaked away to have kittens.) His parents say that she’s just roaming her new territory and might be a little angry for being moved from her old home and that she’ll come back to Omri once she’s settled in, he still worries about her.

One night, he think he hears his cat crying and goes looking for her. He doesn’t see her, but he stumbles on something that was hidden in some old thatch that fell of the roof of the house. It turns out to be a metal box and a notebook belonging to someone named Jessica Charlotte Driscoll, written in 1950. Omri doesn’t know who she is, but the notebook is a story of her life, in which she describes incredible things happening to her which her family doesn’t believe. Omri wonders if she could be a relative of his, and the name Charlotte reminds him of his grandmother, Lottie. He never knew his grandmother and his mother doesn’t even remember her mother because she died in a bombing during WWII, when she was very young. The woman who wrote the notebook couldn’t have actually been his grandmother because she would have been dead for several years by 1950, but perhaps it was a family name.

Omri questions his mother about the cousin who owned the house and her family’s history. Jessica Charlotte turns out to be the sister of Omri’s great-grandmother, his mother’s great-aunt. Great Aunt Jessica Charlotte was the younger sister of his mother’s grandmother. After her mother was killed in the war, Omri’s mother was raised by her grandmother. Omri’s mother had asked her about her younger sister when she was a girl, but her grandmother didn’t like to talk about her. Apparently, Jessica Charlotte had been an actress with a somewhat scandalous past. However, the cousin who used to own this house was Jessica Charlotte’s son, Frederick. Frederick never married, and although Omri’s mother thought that Jessica Charlotte had lived abroad somewhere, it’s possible that she lived at this house for a time.

Much of the story is told through entries in Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. When Omri begins to read the notebook, written toward the end of Jessica Charlotte’s life, he learns, to his shock, that Jessica Charlotte was the original owner of the magic cupboard and that she had her own Little People who visited her from other times and were her friends. After Omri reads that, he questions Gillon, the brother who gave him the cupboard, and he admits that he didn’t really find it in an alley, like he said. He actually found it in the basement of their old house with a bunch of other junk. He just didn’t have the money to buy Omri a birthday present at the time, and Omri had kind of a fascination for secret drawers and boxes, so Gillon thought that he might have some fun with the old cupboard, and he made up the story about mysteriously finding it to make it more interesting. (I suspect that the author was just retconning this part to make it agree with the idea that the cupboard was passed down through Omri’s family, but I like the way this comes out, so I’m okay with that.)

The notebook further explains that Jessica Charlotte had been envious of her older sister because she was prettier, luckier, and often seemed favored by everyone. However, in mocking the young men who came to court her older sister, Jessica Charlotte discovered that she had a talent for mimicry, which led her to become an actress, although her family thought that it was a disreputable profession and disapproved. Jessica Charlotte also discovered that she was psychic and sometimes had visions of the future. She eventually left home and became an actress. Her sister, Maria, still visited her secretly sometimes, against their parents’ wishes.

After awhile, Jessica Charlotte became pregnant with Frederick, which was when she first came to the old house where Omri’s family now lives. She didn’t have any money and couldn’t work while pregnant, and because she was unmarried, she would have been considered shameful if people knew. At that time, the house was a farmhouse belonging to a relative of Frederick’s father. By that point, Jessica Charlotte realized that her boyfriend wasn’t a good person and wasn’t going to be a good father to their son, but he did arrange for this relative of his to help her through her pregnancy. Frederick was born in the house, and because he was illegitimate and sensed his mother’s complicated feelings about him and the circumstances of his birth, he and his mother were never as close as they really should have been.

Meanwhile, Maria got married and had a daughter, Lottie, who was Omri’s grandmother, the one who was killed in the war. Jessica Charlotte says that she did something that wronged Maria and Lottie, and Omri stops reading the diary for a time, but he decides that he really has to continue and know the full story.

Over the years, Jessica Charlotte lived a hard life, supporting Frederick through a mixture of acting and other odd jobs, including fortune telling because of her psychic abilities (although she never used her gift to see into the future for herself or anyone close to her because she was afraid she might see something bad happen to them and be unable to stop it). Meanwhile, Maria was living a very comfortable life with her husband and daughter. Even after their parents died, Maria still had Jessica Charlotte visit secretly because of her tainted reputation, and she never wanted to meet Frederick or talk about him because his birth was the cause of her sister’s scandal. Still, Jessica Charlotte continued to see her sister and became fond of Lottie.

However, Maria was basically a pampered snob who didn’t understand her sister’s life and hardships and also had a streak of self-centeredness. One day, when Lottie was a young child, Maria said that when Lottie was older, she didn’t want her to see so much of her aunt, implying that Jessica Charlotte would be a bad influence on her. Jessica Charlotte was deeply offended by that, but she was also fearful about losing the last family members who were still speaking to her. She had lost so many of her other relationships that she still felt the need to be close to Maria and Lottie as much as she could and visit their pampered and comfortable little world, enjoying occasional tastes of their happier and more comfortable lives.

Yet, Jessica Charlotte’s jealousy for Maria’s pampered life and anger at her callousness continued to eat at her. One day, when Maria was showing her all of her nice jewelry, Jessica Charlotte got the urge to steal a beautiful pair of earrings. First, Maria was being, at the very least, thoughtless and callous for showing off all of her nice jewelry to her much poorer sister, who could never have things like that herself. Maria not only had no concept about what her sister’s life was like outside of her occasional visits, but she purposely never asked her about how she was doing, how her son was doing, or even where they were living, how they were getting by, if they needed anything, or if she could help them in any way. She didn’t know because she didn’t want to know any of these things, and the fact that she didn’t want to know any of that indicates that she knew enough to understand that their circumstances weren’t pleasant. To show off all of her pretty things like that just seems like rubbing it in. Second, Jessica Charlotte had been in need for so long that she saw all of the pretty jewels as symbols of Maria’s comfortable life, something she hungered for herself. The pair of earrings weren’t something that Jessica Charlotte wanted just for the sake of having them but because of what they represented to her, the life that she couldn’t share in and which she knew that Maria would soon shut her out of when she declared that her visits with her young niece would have to stop soon.

Jessica Charlotte planned out the theft in advance, making a duplicate key for her sister’s jewelry box and thinking that her sister would just assume that she’d mislaid that one pair of earrings somewhere. Unfortunately, when Maria noticed that the earrings were gone, she thought Lottie had done something with them, and when she kept insisting that Lottie tell her where they were, Lottie got upset and ran out of the house into the street. Matt, Maria’s husband and Lottie’s father, chased after her and was hit by a cab and killed. Jessica Charlotte felt terrible when she heard the news because she hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt, but there was nothing she could do to take it all back.

Omri knows how Maria and Lottie’s lives went after that point because of what his mother told him about their family history. After Matt died, Maria and Lottie didn’t have very much money to live on, just a little pension, and then their house was burgled, and many of Maria’s nice things were stolen, including the rest of her jewelry, so she couldn’t sell them for extra money. Maria had to move to smaller, cheaper lodgings and get a job for the first time in her life in order to support herself and her daughter, living a life closer to what her sister had been doing. When Lottie was grown and married, she and her husband helped to support her mother, but after they were killed in WWII, Maria took in Lottie’s daughter (Omri’s mother) and had to keep working in order to raise her. Although they were now living in more equal circumstances, the two sisters did not become close again because of Jessica Charlotte’s guilt about what she’d done. Jessica Charlotte ended up buying the old house in the country where her son had been born and told her sister that she was going to live abroad, never telling her exactly where. She had not expected to see Maria again anyway since Maria was planning to cut her out of her daughter’s life before Jessica Charlotte stole the earrings, and after Matt died, Jessica Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to face Maria. Jessica Charlotte lived in the country house until her death in 1950.

When Jessica Charlotte became too weak to write any longer, shortly before her death, she had Frederick finish the story in the notebook. Aside from the difficult feelings between Frederick and his mother because of the circumstances of his birth and the rough and poor childhood he endured, Frederick also says that the two of them don’t really get along because they are very different types of people. When he was grown, Frederick went into business as a metal smith, eventually owning his own factory that made toy soldiers and other metal toys. During WWII, the government had him convert his toy factory to manufacture munitions. He wasn’t happy about it, but it did make him fairly well-off. After the war, Frederick had hoped to go back to making metal toys, but plastic was coming into vogue as the material of choice for toys, and Frederick couldn’t stand the stuff. He thought that the newer plastic toys were cheap and shoddy compared to his detailed works of art in metal. (It was kind of true.) There were basically two choices before Frederick: convert to making the cheap plastic toys he hated or switch to making different types of metal products. He switched to making metal boxes and cabinets.

Frederick never really believed in his mother’s supposed psychic powers, but when he was upset about plastic ruining his metal toy business, he admits that he let his mother talk him into participating in a silly ritual. He was so angry and upset that his emotions were ruining his health, so his mother told him to build something to put his feelings into and shut them away. Frederick built Omri’s magical metal cupboard. When he was finished making it, his mother had him visualize cleansing himself of all of his anger and hatred of plastic and shutting that feeling away in the cupboard. To his surprise, his mother shut and locked the cupboard with a different key from the one that he’d made to put in the cupboard’s lock (her key to her sister’s jewelry box). He thought that this ritual was kind of crazy at first, but he did feel better after he did it. He felt weak for a time, but then he recovered. He still didn’t like plastic, but not to the point where it harmed his health anymore.

Jessica Charlotte had said her son had also inherited her psychic “gift”, even though he didn’t believe in it. Apparently, his strong feelings about plastic produced a kind of magic spell or curse that affected the key and the cupboard and created the effect of bringing plastic toys to life. Jessica Charlotte discovered this herself because her son had given her a set of plastic figures in order to demonstrate to her how these little figures were inferior to his metal ones. Jessica Charlotte put them in the cupboard and brought them to life, and these little friends of hers brought her some happiness in her final days. Frederick thought that her mother was imagining that she was talking to fairies or something and never found out about his mother’s little friends or the magic of the cupboard.

When Jessica Charlotte realized that she was dying, she used the cupboard to send her little friends back to their own time periods, except for one little maid named Jenny, who refused to go back because she’d had a terrible life in her own time. Instead of making her go back, Jessica Charlotte confided in one of the workmen fixing the thatch on her roof and gave Jenny to him. This man, Tom, was lonely because his wife left him for someone else, so Jenny was good company for him for many years, until one day, she simply turned back to plastic suddenly. When Omri finds Tom as an old man and introduces himself as Jessica Charlotte’s distant nephew, Tom explains all of this to him, saying that all he can think of is that Jenny’s physical body must have died in her own time after having been in an apparent coma for years. He buried her little plastic figure respectfully. Tom is also the one who sent the cupboard and key to Maria after Jessica Charlotte died along with a note dictated to him by Jessica Charlotte, hinting at the nature of the cupboard and key and tacitly admitting to the theft of the earrings, so Maria knew the truth of the theft before her own death.

Omri comes to realize that the metal box that Jessica Charlotte left behind, and which was sealed with wax, must contain her collection of little figures. When his friend, Patrick, comes to visit him at his new house, Omri explains the whole situation to him, and Patrick suggests that Omri’s magic key will probably open this metal box, too. Of course, he also points out that if Omri opens the box with that special key, it will bring the figures inside to life, just as it has with the cupboard and Omri’s old trunk. Omri sees Jessica Charlotte’s old figurines as a way of finishing her story and feels compelled to bring them back to life one last time, although he knows that bringing figures to life always comes with complications, and he will have no way of knowing who or what the figures are until the box is open.

When Omri gets the chance to talk to Jessica Charlotte’s little friends, he not only learns more about his great-great-aunt’s past and the history of the cupboard but also sees an opportunity to change the past of his mother and great-grandmother by preventing the robbery that made them poor. But, if he meddles in the past, what will that mean for his future?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction:

This is my favorite book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. I suspect that the author of the series didn’t originally have an explanation for why the cupboard and key were magic, but that’s just a guess on my part. The explanation behind the magic in this book makes sense, and those parts that didn’t quite mesh with the earlier books (like Omri’s brother’s original explanation of finding the cupboard in an alley) were briefly explained. Sometimes, when book or movie series try to explain something magical or a mysterious secret they’ve left hanging, it turns into a let-down because the explanation feels rushed or implausible or fits clumsily into the earlier parts of the story, but this one was pretty smooth, intriguing, and also opened up some new story possibilities.

In previous books, Omri and Patrick both did impulsive things with the cupboard that put their small friends, themselves, and other people in danger, but in this book, both of the boys seem to have matured. Although Patrick thinks of Jessica Charlotte as a bad person and a thief for stealing her sister’s earrings, Omri tries to explain to him that she was a much more complex and conflicted person than that. Yes, Jessica Charlotte was a thief, but her motives were beyond mere greed, and it wasn’t long before she regretted what she’d done and the lasting hurt that she’d caused her family. In considering Jessica Charlotte’s theft and the theft that the burglar who was one of Jessica Charlotte’s little friends later committed against Maria, partly out of personal greed and partly as retribution against Maria on Jessica Charlotte’s behalf, Omri and his mother both come to terms with their family’s history. Patrick, who in previous books had been the more impulsive one when he and Omri interacted with the little people from the past, acts as a restraining influence in this book when Omri is tempted to change his family’s past for the better by preventing the thefts that left his great-grandmother without money. Patrick is the one who makes it clear to Omri that, just as Jessica Charlotte’s theft of a single pair of earrings radically changed the lives of her sister and niece, if Omri tries to stop those events from happening, he might change his family’s past so much that he might accidentally prevent himself or even his own mother from being born in the first place. After Omri tells the thief to give back the jewel box he stole, Omri worries that he’s gone too far, but it turns out that one request was actually fated to happen, just as it turns out that Jessica Charlotte later realized that she had met Omri briefly in what she thought was a dream when he brought her plastic figure to life. Not all of Omri’s “meddling” with the past was really meddling but was actually part of what was fated to happen and has already had an effect on the past even before he knew it.

At the end of this book, something that Omri has alternately dreaded and wanted to happen: his father discovers the secret of the cupboard and meets Omri’s small friends. In books, there is usually this assumption that if parents ever find out about their children’s magical adventures, they will end because the parents will put a stop to them or somehow, the magic will be ruined. However, in this case, the magic is not ruined, and there is one more book in this series where both Omri and his father take part in the magic.

Posted on by TracyC

The Secret of the Indian

The Secret of the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks, 1989.

This is the third book in the Indian in the Cupboard series.

This book immediately picks up where the last book in the series left off, with Omri injured after witnessing the battle in Little Bear’s time and he and Patrick and their small army having just fended off the gang of local hoodlums who had tried to break into Omri’s house and rob it. Omri’s parents return home from the party they had attended and are appalled to see Omri hurt, although the story of the burglary covers up the real reason for Omri’s injuries, which the boys don’t think they can tell Omri’s parents. Omri still can’t adequately explain how part of his head got burned, but he makes up a story about him and Patrick trying to light a bonfire and accidentally getting burned. His parents are occupied, alternately angry with the babysitter who was supposed to come and didn’t and with themselves for leaving before they were sure that she had arrived. The police come to question the boys and inform the parents that the reason why the babysitter didn’t come was that she was mugged that night. Omri knows who the thieves are, but hesitates to turn them in.

First, Omri needs to deal with Little Bear and his band of warriors. Some of them were killed in the battle, and others are injured. Patrick and Omri bring the Matron who treated Little Bear before to life to help them, but although she does her best, she says that her skills aren’t adequate to help them all and that they need a real surgeon. The Matron is sharp and tells the boys that it’s useless to insist that this is all just a dream because she knows that, strange as this situation is, it’s all real and that the death and pain she’s witnessed around her are real. The boys explain to her about the key and cupboard that bring plastic figures to life, and she asks them if they can get a doctor. It’s Sunday, so the boys can’t just go buy one, but the Matron came from a set owned by Patrick’s cousin, Tamsin, and there were other medical professional figures in it. When Patrick’s other cousin, Tamsin’s twin, Emma, comes to Omri’s house to see Patrick, Omri is forced to let her in on the secret and recruit her to help him.

Meanwhile, Patrick has gone back in time with Boone the cowboy. In Boone’s time, Patrick is tiny, the size of the figures in his own time. Unfortunately, Patrick made a terrible mistake by going back to Boone’s time with Boone as a plastic figure. That meant that Boone became a real person in the chest, trapped under Patrick’s body and almost smothered to death and needs to be treated by the Matron in order to survive.

In Boone’s time, tiny Patrick ends up in the company of Ruby Lou, a woman who likes Boone. Patrick knows that Boone is unconscious in the desert and helps Ruby Lou to find him. The doctor in their time doesn’t know what’s wrong with Boone and can’t figure out why he’s unconscious, suggesting only that they let him rest for the present and recover. Ruby Lou presses Patrick for answers, and he explains everything to her about how they travel through time using the magic key and how Boone has just left his full-size body behind to go into the future in the form of a little figurine. It’s an incredible story, but Ruby Lou believes him and expresses concern about getting Boone back safely. But soon, they’re all in trouble when there’s cyclone threatening.

Also meanwhile, Mr. Johnson, the headmaster of Omri’s school, has learned about Omri’s story that won the contest. Back in the first book of this series, Mr. Johnson actually saw Little Bear. At the time, he thought that he was hallucinating, but Omri’s supposedly fictional story has now convinced him that he really saw what he saw. He demands that Omri tell him the truth about his “Red Indian.” (Omri corrects him, saying that it isn’t right to say “Red Indian” and that they prefer to be called “American Indian” or “native American”, but Mr. Johnson angrily insists that he’s always said “Red Indian” and will continue to do so, establishing him as an unsympathetic villain in the story.) Mr. Johnson is relieved to know that he wasn’t hallucinating before, but since Omri is reluctant to explain anything, he decides to call Omri’s mother. When she answers, she demands that Omri tell her where Patrick is because his mother is frantically looking for him.

Of course, Omri knows that Patrick is still in the trunk in his room, in a coma-like state because he’s still in the past and there are living miniature people in his room who will also be discovered if people start searching. Can Omri fix everything in time to rescue Patrick and his little friends and prevent their secret from being exposed?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Although the story takes place immediately after the previous one left off, the rules of the magic in this world have changed a little. Before, when a person from Omri and Patrick’s time went back to the past, they kind of became part of the scenery. This time, when Patrick visits the Old West, he is there as a tiny person, although no figurines of the boys exist in the past. What this book does emphasize is that the magic key does change real people from modern times into little people into people in another time and real people from other times into tiny people in modern times. At this point in the series, it’s all still mysterious why the key is magic and why the little cupboard in particular only seems to affect plastic items and people. Some of those explanations come in the next book.

I did like the parts where other people, including Patrick’s cousin Emma and Mr. Johnson in the present and Ruby Lou in the past, catch on what’s happening with Omri and Patrick and their plastic figures. In so many children’s books, the magic absolutely depends on secrecy. In this series, Patrick and Omri both know that they don’t want most people to know their secret because they don’t want people either interfering or thinking that they’re crazy. With Patrick disappearing mysteriously and other things happening because of their interactions with the little people from the past, it makes sense that people would start noticing that the boys have become involved in something really strange, even thought some of them don’t know what it is. However, the magic still works for them even when other people find out and the people who could pose a threat to their activities either never find out the truth or are distracted or apparently discredited.

At the end of this book, Omri becomes more serious about the risks of the cupboard and decides that he wants the key put away, to be give to his future children in the event of his death. However, there are other books in this series to come, so they do use the key again.

Posted on by TracyC

The Return of the Indian

The Return of the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks, 1986.

This is the second book in the Indian in the Cupboard series.

Omri’s family has moved to a new house, but Omri doesn’t like it. The new house is bigger than the old one, but the neighborhood around it is a bit run-down and shabby. Most of the kids in the area go to the state school (public school in the US), but Omri attends a private school, and his school uniform makes him stand out from the other kids. The other kids in the neighborhood view him as an outsider and like to push him around, especially the group of bigger boys who like to hang out near the arcade. Omri is a little afraid of the local bullies, but he doesn’t like to show it. Instead, he remembers how brave his small American Indian friend, the one who came to life from his plastic figurine, was with him, even though Omri was many times bigger than he was. Still, Little Bear was a real warrior, who knew how to fight. Ormi wishes that he could fight like an American Indian or maybe a cowboy, like Boone. If he could do that, he wouldn’t have any reason to fear the local bullies.

Patrick, Omri’s best friend, is also living in a new house in the country and is now going to a different school because his parents have divorced. (The story indicates that Patrick’s father was abusive, hitting his wife and children.) When the two of them meet again, Patrick denies remembering their plastic figures that came to life. That bothers Omri, although he thinks that Patrick really does remember but doesn’t want to admit it because talking about things like that would make him seem weird when he’s trying to fit in with his new home.

Then, Omri wins a writing contest for a story that he wrote about his plastic Indian. He’s thrilled, although he also feels a little guilty because the contest was supposed to be for fiction, and his magical adventures with Little Bear were real. Although, his story is his own work, even if he didn’t exactly make up Little Bear.

Ever since his adventures with Little Bear the previous year, Omri has asked his mother to keep the key to the cupboard “safe” for him. Really, he has wanted to remove the temptation to bring Little Bear to life again. After their previous adventures, they had all decided that it would be better for Little Bear and Boone to remain in their own lives in the past. Yet, having won this contest, Omri has the sudden desire to see Little Bear again and tell him all about it. His mother usually wears the key as a pendant around her neck, and one day, when she takes it off, Omri decides that he’s going to use it.

However, when he brings Little Bear and his wife, Bright Stars, back to life from plastic, he finds that time has moved forward for Little Bear, just has it has for him. Little Bear is badly injured, having been shot by a soldier. Bright Stars begs Omri for help. Since Omri once brought a WWI medic to life to help with a wound before, he tries it again. Unfortunately, this time, all Omri gets is an empty pile of the medic’s clothes. Shocked, Omri realizes that this is a sign that the medic was killed in action. Time moved forward for him since their last encounter, and the medic, Tommy, who was a real person in the past, was killed during the war.

Still desperate to help Little Bear, Omri rushes to see Patrick at his aunt’s house and explains the situation. At first Patrick tries to pretend that the figures coming to life was just their imaginations, but when Omri impresses on him that Little Bear is in trouble and needs help, Patrick takes him seriously and comes up with a solution. One of his cousins got a set of plastic figures for her birthday, and they all have different professions. Among them, there is a nurse and two doctors. If they borrow one of those figures, they will have medical help. The cousin finds them messing with her toys and fights with them, so they have to rush off in a hurry, taking the nurse figure instead of one of the doctors, but she’s better than nothing.

After the nurse, known only as Matron, gets over the shock of finding herself very small, Omri explains Little Bear’s condition to her. She’s reluctant to try to operate on him herself because she’s not a surgeon, but since there is no one else to help, she does so anyway. Omri gives her Tommy’s medical bag so she’ll have the implements she needs. She manages to help Little Bear, and Little Bear recovers.

Although Patrick says that his mother got rid of most of his plastic figures when he stopped playing with them, he still has the cowboy, Boone, because he was special. Patrick uses the cupboard to bring him back to life, and they explain to him about Little Bear. When Little Bear is well enough to talk, he explains that his village was attacked by French soldiers, and many of his people are dead. Boone spots Omri’s collection of plastic figures, with soldiers from different periods and suggests sending them back with Little Bear to fight the French. Patrick is all for it, but Omri points out that there are problems with that. All of those figures aren’t just toy soldiers; they represent real people from history. They all come from different periods of history, and they all have their own goals and personalities. They would all be shocked at finding themselves in an unexpected place and a completely different time period than their own, and there’s no telling how these armed people might react. What would a Medieval knight, who might be on his way to the Crusades, understand about American Indians from the 18th century, and why would he be willing to fight on their behalf? Which side would a member of the French Legion pick? They wouldn’t be able to even speak to all of Omri soldiers because they come from different countries and speak different languages, and even if they choose modern British soldiers using modern weaponry, what would that mean for history? They don’t belong in the 18th century, and because they’re real people, they would be killing other real people and might get killed themselves.

Patrick thinks that Omri thinks too much, but Ormi knows that Patrick is too impulsive. Patrick does impulsively bring some modern soldiers to life, and they almost shoot everyone because they’re in the middle of a battle. Patrick quickly turns them back to toys and apologizes. Then Omri has another idea: they can’t explain to people from other time periods that Little Bear needs their help to fight in the French and Indian Wars, but they could appeal to other American Indians. Finding allies for Little Bear is fine, as long as they’re the kind of allies who could reasonably appear in Little Bear’s time and understand and be willing to aid him.

There are complications in this plan when Little Bear says that he wants modern weapons his people can use and a modern soldier to teach them how to use them. Omri has misgivings about this but gives in to Little Bear’s request. While Little Bear goes back to his time with his new allies and weapons, the boys worry about what’s happening in the battle and Bright Stars, who is still in their care, gives birth to Little Bear’s son. Boone suggests to Omri that, if he’s concerned about how the battle is going, there might be a way to go back in time and see it.

Ormi has an old wooden chest in his room, and Boone suggests that he could see if the key fits the box and use it to send himself back to Little Bear’s time. Not only does Omri help Little Bear and the others, but this odd army also helps Omri when the local bullies try to rob his house in the middle of the night.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction:

I read the first book in this series when I was in elementary school as part of a class assignment. There are parts of this series I like, but parts I don’t.

I like the way Omri thinks about the little people from his cupboard. He remembers that all of the plastic figures are only plastic when they’re toys, but as soon as they come to life, they are real people, pulled out of their own lives and into his, and they have a responsibility to them. He feels terrible when he realizes that his old friend, the WWI medic called Tommy, died during the war because he wasn’t just a toy, he was a real person who helped them when they needed him, and Omri realizes that he probably died not long after they returned him to his own time. Patrick is less thoughtful, but he does wonder if their interaction with him played a part in his death, and Omri thinks it probably didn’t because his full-sized body must have remained in the past and would have died anyway. When they last talked to him, Tommy said that he’d heard the sounds of an attack, and that could have been the attack that killed him. When Omri sends Little Bear back with his new allies and weapons, Omri feels guilty because he realizes that he’s basically playing God, sending real people to kill other real people in past, but he goes through with it because he feels committed to it at that point, having assembled and armed this fighting force and promised it to Little Bear.

I didn’t like some of the stereotypical stuff about cowboys and American Indians. This is one of those books where they try to write characters speaking with an accent, and that always feels awkward to read, and I’m not sure that everything Omri says about American Indians is true. At first, Omri says that American Indians gave birth alone, so he’s not too worried about Bright Stars. When I read that, I wasn’t sure if any American Indian tribes had that as a custom, so I looked it up. Apparently, there is some basis for that happening, although sometimes women would also help each other, and since most of the white people who said that Native Americans gave birth alone were men and wouldn’t have been involved in assisting the birth anyway, they may not have been fully aware of who else would have been involved. When Bright Stars starts giving birth, Omri remembers hearing that, when women give birth for the first time, it can take a long time for the baby to arrive, and he wonders if that’s true of American Indians as well as white women. That question made me cringe a little. As an adult white woman, I would assume it probably is because there many aspects of the human condition that are just universal, but again, Omri’s a boy who doesn’t have any relevant life experience experience, and even I can’t swear what Native American births are like, so I suppose I can’t fault him for wondering.

This is the book that establishes that the key used with the cupboard is magic by itself. It seems to fit in any lock and can send people back in time. When they’re sent back from the present day, Omri observes that the person sent to the past is cold and motionless in the chest, which scares him. Also, the boys observe that when they go to the past, they seem to be part of the scenery, part of the paintings on the side of Little Bear’s teepee, unable to speech or move by themselves, just watching what happens. It’s odd, but in stories where there’s magic, there are still rules, and as the boys experiment more with the key, part of the rules start becoming more clear to the readers.