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.