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The Story of the Treasure Seekers

The story of the treasure seekers book cover

The Story of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit, 1899.

This story (the first in a series) is told by one of the six Bastable children: Dora, Oswald (who won the Latin prize at his school), Dicky, the twins Alice and Noel, and Horace Octavius (called H.O. for short). The narrator initially refuses to identify which of the Bastable children he is, saying that he might admit it at the end, but his constant self-praise (which begins immediately) and the way he refers to his siblings kind of gives it away. At various points in the story, he forgets that he’s trying to be mysterious about his identity and just refers to himself in the first person, although he goes back to the third person when he remembers. The children live with their father, but their mother is dead. The narrator says, “and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all.” The story isn’t about missing their mother, but about their search for treasure. (“It was Oswald who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very interesting things.”)

The Bastables are in need of money. After their mother died, their father was ill for a time. Then, his business partner went to Spain, and his business hasn’t been very good since. The children can tell that their father is economizing on household goods. He’s sold some things from the house, there doesn’t seem to be money to have broken things fixed or replaced, and he’s let the gardener and other servants go. He’s not even sending the children to school right now because he can’t afford the school fees, and people have been coming to the house about unpaid bills. Oswald thinks that the best thing to do is to look for treasure to restore their family’s fortunes.

The children all think of ways that they can look for treasure. Oswald wants to become a highwayman and hold people up, but Dora, as the eldest, rejects that idea as wrong. His next suggestion is that they rescue a rich old gentleman and get a reward, but that’s a long shot. Alice thinks they should try using a divining rod. H.O. is in favor of the idea of being bandits. Noel likes books, and he wants to either write poetry and publish it or possibly marry a princess. Dicky is more practical with things like math and money, and he tells the others about an advertisement in the newspaper about a way to earn money in your spare time. Since the children aren’t going to school and have plenty of time, he thinks they should try it. He also has another idea, but he refuses to explain to the others exactly what the scheme is. Dora, as the eldest, decides that they should just try digging for treasure, not even bothering with a divining rod, because it seems like people always find treasure by digging. Since that’s the most straight-forward method any of them have thought of yet, they decide to go with that.

They recruit Albert, the boy from next door, to help with the digging. They don’t always get along with Albert because Albert doesn’t like reading and isn’t good at games of pretend. (The children seem to know that this treasure hunt is a game, although they’re still half-way hopeful that they’ll actually find something.) Still, they manage to persuade Albert, and the children begin digging a tunnel. It’s Albert’s turn to dig when the tunnel collapses, half-burying the unlucky Albert, who screams and keeps on screaming while Dicky runs to get Albert’s uncle. Albert’s father is dead, so he lives with his mother and his uncle, who used to be a sailor and now writes books. The children all like Albert’s uncle because they like his books, and he seems to know a lot. Albert’s uncle matter-of-factly digs Albert out of the hole and asks the children how he came to be buried. The Bastable children explain about their search for treasure. Albert’s uncle says that he doubts they’ll find any treasure in the area, but as he unearths Albert, he seems to find a couple of coins, which he gives to the children to divide among themselves and Albert. (It’s hinted that Albert’s uncle is just giving the children pocket money that he pretends to find.) It’s an uneven amount, so they agree that Albert can have the larger share because he got buried.

The Bastable children could have used their new pocket money as stake money for the venture Dicky saw in the newspaper, but there are some other things they want to buy, so they spend it all and have to try something else. One of the children (they disagree later about who it was) brings up the subject of detectives, like Sherlock Holmes. They think that detectives must earn a lot of money, so some of them think they ought to try being detectives. Alice says that she doesn’t want anything to do with murders because that would be dangerous, and even if they did kill someone, she would feel bad if she had to be the one to get them hanged for it. After all, surely nobody would want to kill someone more than once anyway, so there’s probably little risk that they’d do it again. (Oh, boy. Alice has apparently never heard of serial killers. Jack the Ripper had already committed his murders by the time this book was written and published.) The others tell her that detectives probably don’t get to choose which crimes they investigate. They just have to look into any mysterious situations they encounter and see what they turn out to be. That reminds Alice that she did see something mysterious herself. She got up during the night because she suddenly remembered that she’d forgotten to feed her pet rabbits, and she saw a light in a nearby house, where the entire family is supposedly away at the seaside. The children think that some criminals may be hiding in the empty house and decide to investigate. It turns out that there is an innocent explanation. Oswald accidentally falls and gets knocked unconscious during the investigation, so Albert’s uncle is again recruited to carry him home, and the uncle lectures them about spying on people.

Since another money-making scheme has failed, they decide to move on to the next idea, publishing Noel’s poetry. He doesn’t have enough poems for a book, but they remember that they’ve seen poetry published in a newspaper, so they decide to talk to the newspaper editor. Oswald and Noel go to see the editor together. Along the way, they meet a woman who also writes poetry. She reads Noel’s poems and says that she likes them, giving the boys a little stake money to get Noel’s literary career started. At first, Oswald refuses the money because he remembers that he’s not supposed to accept gifts from strangers, but the woman insists that the gift is that from a fellow writer, not a stranger, and she gives them her card. The children’s father later says that she’s famous for her poetry, although the boys had never heard of her before.

When they see the newspaper editor, he seems amused by Noel’s poetry (which includes an elegy to a dead beetle) and very interested in how and why he came to write poetry. He invites the boys to join him for tea, and they explain about how they’re trying to restore their family’s fortunes. The editor says that he’s willing to buy Noel’s poems and publish them, and he asks what Noel thinks would be a fair price. Noel isn’t sure because he originally just wrote the poems because he likes poetry, not to sell. The editor offers him a guinea, which is more money than they’ve ever had before, and the boys are impressed and accept it. The editor says that his paper doesn’t normally publish poetry, but he can arrange for it to be published in a different paper. They later see a story in a magazine about them, written by the editor, with all of Noel’s poems with it. Oswald isn’t happy at how the story describes them, but Noel is pleased that he’s been published.

The book continues from the summer through the fall, and the children continue trying various money-making schemes, with varying degrees of disaster and success. Noel finds a princess to marry, but they only get a few chocolates out of that adventure. While Dora is away, visiting her godmother, the other children turn bandits on Guy Fawkes Day. The only person they can find to kidnap and ransom as bandits is Albert, who doesn’t like this game at all. (The children again seem to realize that this is only a game, but at the same time, they hope for a little money out of it.) They write the ransom note for Albert using H.O.’s blood because this adventure was his idea (although they also have to use red ink to finish it because they don’t get enough blood from H.O.’s finger). Albert’s uncle, who enjoys a good game of pretend, comes to ransom Albert, although he can’t pay the enormous sum mentioned in the ransom note. He tells the children that he knows it’s all a game, and he thinks a little more pretend play would do Albert good (Albert doesn’t have much imagination), and the rough play is also punishment for Albert sneaking out of the house while he should have been inside, nursing his cold. However, the uncle says they should have realized how scary that ransom note could have been for Albert’s mother if he hadn’t seen Albert with the children and knew where he was and what was really happening. The children apologize and admit that they don’t think much about people’s mothers since they lost their own. (Although the book is mostly funny, there are sentimental bits, too.)

Albert’s uncle suggests a more harmless money-making scheme to the children – starting a newspaper, and they let Albert join them. Their newspaper contains a couple of serial stories (that don’t entirely make sense, and some of the children can’t think what to contribute to them), some poetry by Noel, some “Curious Facts” (that aren’t entirely factual but are very curious), and an editorial piece on the subject of education by Alice, who says that if she had a school, nobody would learn anything they didn’t want to learn, but there would be cats, and the students would sometimes dress up like cats and practice purring. The newspaper turns out to be not very lucrative, and the children run out of things to write about, so they give that up and return to more hair-brained schemes.

Oswald tries to rescue an elderly gentleman so that the wealthy old gentleman will richly reward him, just like in books, but not finding any danger to save him from, he sets their dog on him, so he can easily save him. The gentleman, a local lord and politician, figures out pretty quickly that this was a scheme and that the dog belongs to the children, and he demands an explanation. The children explain to him about trying to restore their family’s fortunes by doing the things that seem to work for people in books, only nothing they’ve tried works like it does it books. The old gentlemen gives the a lecture about honesty and honor and consideration for other people, and the children make their apologies to him.

From there, they try the part-time job advertised in the newspaper, which turns out to be getting people to place orders for wine by giving them free samples. The children try a little of the wine themselves, but they don’t like it, so they add a bunch of sugar to try to improve the taste. You can imagine how well a group of children trying to give various strangers free wine goes. Eventually, someone confiscates the bottle and tells their father what they’ve been up to.

Although they promise their father that they won’t attempt to go into business again without talking to him about it, they start thinking that they could make a lot of money if they invented a wonderful medicine that would cure something. After arguing about what they’re going to cure, they decide they’re going to cure the common cold. The only way they can think of inventing the medicine is for one of them to get a cold and then for all the others to try various things to cure it. Noel is the one who catches cold, and the others try to cure him. When they can’t cure Noel’s cold, they worry that he’s going to die from it, but fortunately, he does recover.

However, there are times when the children do things that are helpful, typically by accident. The best thing they do is to be extra friendly to a man who comes to see their father. The children come to the conclusion that he’s a poor man and that their father is being kind to him, but they’re not satisfied with the level of hospitality that their father offers. The children decide to invite him to their kind of dinner, and the fun they have together encourages him to give their father the help he needs. The children come to the conclusion that, sometimes, life can be like books.

The book is now public domain, so it is available to read online through Project Gutenberg (also in audio format) and Internet Archive (multiple copies, including audiobooks). There is also a LibriVox Audiobook on YouTube. It’s the first in a series of books about the same children. The story has also been made into movies multiple times. The original book contains some inappropriate racial stereotypes and language, which I discuss below. However, recent reprintings of the book have changed some of the inappropriate language, so the book would probably be okay for modern children, if you pick a book with a recent printing date.

My Reaction

I really enjoyed this story, even though there are some problematic racial issues, which I’m also going to describe and discuss. The descriptions of the children’s schemes and escapades are very funny, and I laughed out loud at some parts. The story reminds me of some of the MacDonald Hall books where the boys do some bizarre fund-raising efforts or try to get publicity for their school. The children’s efforts to find or earn money in this book are based on books that were popular with children in the late Victorian era and money-making schemes that existed at that time. Not all of them would be as familiar to modern children as they would have been to children of the late Victorian era, but I think modern children could understand most of them, with the possible exception of the man who I think was supposed to be a money lender.

If this book was set in modern times, in the early 21st century, I think that their bizarre money-making schemes would be a little more like those in the MacDonald Hall books, although I can think of a few more. Alice’s description of the ideal school, with cats who teach students how to purr, makes me think that, if she were a modern girl, she would want to start a cat cafe out of their house using a bunch of stray cats (or maybe some borrowed from neighbors without permission), which would also be hilarious. I would like to see a book with someone doing something like that because the opportunities for things to go wrong would be both boundless and guaranteed to happen. (Corralling the cats, possibly abducting cats from neighbors, messing up the tea and food, health violations, lack of business license, cats biting and clawing people and messing up the house and trying desperately to escape, etc.)

One thing that I like about the Bastable Children series in general is that there are many references to books that children from the late Victorian era would have known and enjoyed. This book references things that I think came from the Arabian Nights, and the children refer directly to Sherlock Holmes, The Jungle Books, and The Children of the New Forest, which was a 19th century historical novel.

Reality vs Pretend

Much of the book is about the difference between reality and pretend, and the Bastable children often end up about halfway between the two with most of their schemes. They draw much of their inspiration from books they’ve read, and they seem to be aware that much of what they do is a game of pretend, although they also seem to halfway hope that their schemes will work out for them the way they would if they were children from the books they’ve read.

The children’s innocence and naivete about the way the world works is a major reason why they don’t understand how things work differently between the real world and the world in stories. It’s also the reason why they only seem to halfway grasp their father’s money troubles and the reasons for them. Adults often find the innocence of children to be charming, and the adults in the story are often charmed by the children for that reason. It works in their favor in the end because they receive kindness from adults for being charming, innocent children, who know how to have fun. However, the adults in the story also understand the children’s family situation, seemingly even better than they do, and they frequently humor them and help them out of pity. It’s both funny and also a little sad and touching at times for adults reading this book. It’s funny because you can see what the children are really doing and follow their logic as they map out their plans, while at the same time spotting how it’s all going to go wrong before the children see it themselves. It’s also a little sad and worrying because you can also see how little the children are being supervised and how much they turn to the kindly uncle who lives next door for help when they’re in real trouble because their mother is dead and their father is wrapped up in his own troubles.

The subject of the children’s deceased mother comes up periodically throughout the book, as the children think about how things have changed for the family since she died. Dora admits to Oswald that, before their mother died, she asked Dora to look after the younger children. That’s why Dora has been trying to be responsible and to stop the other children from doing things she knows are wrong (like turning into bandits to rob people for money). The other children often get irritated with her for stopping them from doing things they want to do, and they frequently do the wrong thing anyway, even if they have to go behind her back to do it. Oswald develops some sympathy for Dora when he realizes that she’s been trying to do a difficult job that she doesn’t really know how to do, and he talks to some of the other children about going easy on her.

Racial Issues and Gender Stereotypes

This book has been reprinted many times since its original publication, and modern editions have been edited to remove inappropriate racial language. The original book has multiple places where there are racial issues and gender stereotypes, although they mostly come from two very specific sources. The gender stereotypes, which are found in other books in this series as well, come from our narrator, Oswald. Oswald has noticed that his sisters and other girls have different standards from him and his brothers, and it sometimes irritates him. Like other boys in vintage children’s books, he also has a tendency to try to show that boys are better than girls, sometimes saying things like, “Girls think too much of themselves if you let them do everything the same as men.” I partly think that the author, who was a woman, put things like that in her stories to show how boys of her time behaved, but maybe also to poke fun at men who felt threatened by women doing things that were considered for men only, like they’re little boys, feeling threatened by sisters who can do what they do.

Much of the racial issues in the story come from the children’s playacting, which is again based on the books they’ve read. They frequently refer to “Red Indians”, by which they mean Native Americans. Based on what they’ve read from books, American Indians are fascinating and exciting but also savage, and they love all of that. Actually, now that I think of it, that stereotype isn’t a bad description of the Bastable children themselves. They are somewhat savage or semi-feral in their behavior at times, although they would probably hate being called that. They’re certainly not tame children. I don’t entirely blame the children in the story for having misconceptions about other people because children can get misconceptions from things they read, see, or are told by adults. I don’t entirely blame the author for depicting the kind of misconceptions children have, either, especially because the Bastable children’s misconceptions make up a large part of the story and its humor. What is more concerning to me is the original sources of these misconceptions, the things that children get from people who should know better, who might even actually know better but who spread misconceptions anyway for their own purposes.

Whether the author of this book could be considered a source of misconceptions, or at least for perpetuating them, is a matter for debate. The references to other pieces of real literature and how the children use them for inspiration for what they do point to earlier books that sparked these misconceptions and racial stereotypes. I’ve always thought that the things children read early in life set them up for many of their attitudes as adults, and that’s why I think it’s unfair to expose children to literature that creates these misconceptions without an accompanying explanation about why certain attitudes are wrong or harmful and how spreading them causes problems. As adults, we often forgive children for things they do and think because we know they’re young and still learning, but children don’t stay little forever, and they need to know what is expected of them as they grow older. When they’re no longer little kids, people expect them to have a certain level of understanding about the world, the people in it, and how to treat others and speak respectfully about them. If they don’t demonstrate that kind of understanding by a certain age, many people will not take it that they’re still in the learning phase but will think that they’re being deliberately insulting or trying to provoke others when they speak inappropriately. In many cases, those people will be correct because there are people of all ages who like to push other people’s buttons to get a reaction, but I think it’s doing a great disservice to set children up for that type of conflict by trying to keep them “innocent” for too long. I’ve seen that even kids who know that there are certain words they shouldn’t use don’t always seem to understand why they’re not supposed to use them, and that half knowledge is part of the reason why they sometimes throw around nasty terms like they don’t know what they mean. The truth is, some of them really don’t. Kids like that don’t sound charmingly innocent in the 21st century. They sound dumb and clueless because they are these things. The things they don’t know are painfully obvious, and people, even possibly other kids their own age, will definitely notice and openly comment on it. The reason why they’re so clueless is that the adults in their lives who knew enough to tell them, at some point, that these were bad or shocking words to use around other people apparently didn’t explain to them why or make it clear what the social consequences for using these words would be. What I’m trying to say is not that reading this book or others of this vintage is bad, but if you’re going to share books like this with kids, with the original wording, you can’t do it properly without talking to the kids and being very direct about certain subjects. If you’re not, it could lead to problems, and it will be no favor to the child to set them up for that. The things people don’t know will almost certainly hurt them eventually and probably damage their relationships with others along the way.

The Bastable children don’t end up with damaged relationships or social consequences for the things they do because they are still young enough to be considered charmingly innocent and naive in their antics, although at least some of them would be considered old enough to know better about some things by their age. The children don’t even seem to understand the difference between Native American Indians and Indians from India until it is explained to them toward the book, when their “Indian uncle” comes to see them. The Indian uncle is the source of another racial issue in the language he uses. He’s one of the adults who says things he shouldn’t, and I need to talk about what he says and why he says it.

Readers should be aware that the original printing of this book contains the n-word. There is one use of the n-word by an adult character, toward the end of the book. It happens just once in the story, although it threw me when I reached that point because there wasn’t really anything leading up to it, so its use seemed rather sudden. It’s a shame because, up to that point, I was prepared to make some allowances for what the children say about “Red Indians” as part of their innocent ignorance, but as I said, we make allowances for the things children do that we don’t for people who are old enough to know better. The “Indian uncle” just throws out the n-word in a casual expression he uses, like “If Oswald isn’t a man, then I’m a monkey’s uncle,” except he uses the n-word instead of “monkey’s uncle.” A more recent edition of the book I’ve seen replaces the n-word with the word “fool.” I could forgive the children some of the racial stereotypes they use in some of their games because the entire premise of the story is that the Bastable children are naive and somewhat clueless, getting most of their sense of how the world works from storybooks instead of guiding adults, but things that adults say and do are different. To say that this was simply part of the way people talked during this period of history would be taking the easy way out and providing an apparent excuse for the behavior. Everyone has reasons for the things we say and do, and I’m not letting either the author or this “Indian uncle” off the hook that easily without prodding deeper into both of their motives.

The n-word isn’t something that appears in many of the children’s books I’ve read, even the vintage and antique books, because it’s a crude term. Technically, the n-word isn’t even really a word by itself but a slang corruption of a word, and it’s been considered a crudity and an insult since much earlier in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, its use was associated primarily with uneducated and unrefined “poor white trash” in the United States, and whatever their personal racial attitudes, people who wanted to be seen as educated would avoid its use. Those who did use it tended to use it in a derogatory and hostile way. Even in children’s books as old as this one, the use of crude racial terms (when they appear) are often used to establish the personality and background of the character who uses them. They appear as hints of crudeness, lack of good upbringing and moral character, and even violence and criminal tendencies (see books in the Rover Boys series for examples). Even when other characters use racial stereotypes in these stories, the use of the n-word in particular tends to signal something crude and nasty in the user’s character, something that goes beyond the other characters’ level of acceptability, especially when it comes from a character who is portrayed as being old enough and educated enough to know better. A contrast would be the Little House on the Prairie series, where characters sometimes use crude racial terms without being the villains of the story. However, the characters in the Little House on the Prairie books can still fall under the description of uneducated and unrefined. They are a poor farming family who lives much of their lives in the backwoods and on relatively isolated farms. When they associate with other people, it is most often people who are very similar to themselves, so they’re rarely in a position to get feedback from a wider society. The while the Ingalls family does try to better themselves and seek out educational opportunities later in the series, characters in those books could be considered “innocent” about certain things in much the same sense as the Bastable children are. That is, none of them know any better. The term “innocent” implies a lack of knowledge and experience as well as a lack of guilt. The Bastable children are, once again, proof that what you don’t know is obvious to others who do know, and it can hurt your image.

With that in mind, when I have seen the n-word or similar words in print, my main approach is to use it as a clue about the personality of the character who says it or about the author who wrote the dialog or both. One of the difficulties that I encountered with this particular book, compared to others, is that the author sets up the “Indian uncle” who uses the n-word to be one of the “good” characters, a rich and kindly relative who saves them all from poverty. He would seem to be in the position of someone who should know better than to use the n-word, but he does so anyway, in a casual and thoughtless way. That makes this book different from other books, where the n-word is used by characters who are definitely villains and whose use of crude language is portrayed as part of their rough and ill-mannered character. The uncle’s age and position in society wouldn’t seem to put him in the position of an ignorant innocent, and yet, he’s not portrayed as a rough villain. However, there is something else at play in this situation that I think explains who this “Indian uncle” really is and what his deal is, and that’s Victorian British colonialism.

In this series of books, adults are not always referred to by name but by their relationship to the children or the role they play in the children’s lives. In this case, the “Indian uncle” (who is never called anything else by the children, not even by his personal name) is not an “Indian” of any kind. This is just another of the children’s misconceptions because of what their father told them about him. He is apparently really an uncle of the children, and he has recently returned to England from India, but he is white and British, like the rest of their family. This is revealed in hints that go over the children’s heads at first, but which are explained more toward the end of the book.

First, the children listen in on some of the things their father and uncle say to each other when they’re having dinner, and they hear them talking about “native races” and “imperial something-or-other.” The children don’t understand what they’re talking about. Because of the books that they’ve been reading, they’re still under the impression that “Indian” means that this uncle of theirs is a Native American, but adults will put together the bits and pieces and realize that, since this story is late Victorian, the uncle has just come from India, which is under British imperial rule, and like an imperialist, he’s probably not saying many complimentary things about the “native races” there. 19th century British racial concepts were shaped by their colonization and quest for empire and were frequently expressed in a pseudo-scientific form of social Darwinism, that some races of people on Earth had evolved to be more successful than others, with the British at the top of the heap because they had successfully conquered other people and took over their land for their own use. (By this definition, I note that highwaymen and robbers should also be considered vastly superior to the people they rob because they successfully took something away from someone else. I’m sure that the Victorians would be insulted by that comparison, but I think it accurately shows the problems with this type of thinking.)

Second, when the uncle’s house is described, it’s full of taxidermy animals, most of which he killed himself (this is discussed further in the second book in the series) during his travels. That’s when it is revealed that the uncle has actually come from India and is not Native American at all, as the children had supposed. He is a wealthy man who has traveled as an adventurer, which is exciting for the children to hear about, but this is also another clue to the uncle’s personality. I noticed that the author made it a point to say that the uncle’s study was very different from the children’s father’s study because it didn’t have books in it but had those taxidermy animals. I took this as an indication that the uncle is not as much of a man of learning or business as the children’s father. He doesn’t use his study for reading and studying anything. He has money, but I’m guessing that he didn’t get it from having a profession. The children mention that their father went to Balliol College, and they meet a friend of his from his student days. Their father spends most of his time working, even though his business is suffering, and his old friend is also a family man with job (he is described as a sub-editor in the next book in the series). However, the “Indian uncle” is not described as having any profession. We don’t know if he ever attended college, but if he did, it probably wasn’t to be educated for a career. He is a man of leisure or relative leisure, who has apparently spent a good part of his life traveling around the world, shooting things and having them stuffed, and has little interest in books and studying. He’s had the money to live this kind of life, so he does it, fully confident in his superiority and ability to go where he wants and do what he likes. What I’m thinking is that this man is probably their father’s elder brother, who probably inherited money and indulged himself, while his brother studied and worked. Travel can broaden a person’s perspective, but the uncle seems to have traveled for self-indulgent adventure and excitement rather than learning about the world and the people in it. He’s got enough money that he probably doesn’t have to learn anything he doesn’t want to, and as the man who pays the bills and hires people to do things for him, he’s probably not held accountable for much. He can say and do what he likes, so he does that, without giving it a second thought, and maybe not even a first one. This isn’t explained in the course of the book, and I can’t point to much more than I already have to support it, but I think this man is meant to represent a type of wealthy British imperial adventurer.

Ultimately, what I’m saying is that the children think their uncle is a great man because he brings the family to live with him in his big house and helps their father with his business (probably by providing financial backing), so the family’s circumstances improve. He can invest money in their father’s business (the nature of which isn’t specified), and he showers the children with presents, which they love. However, as an adult, I’m noting his apparent relative lack of interest in books, intellectualism, and refinement of manners. I’m sure that the children will find him exciting to be around, but he doesn’t strike me as a learned man, a well-read one, or even a very well-behaved one. He has a lot of money, which can be used to fund the children’s education, but I don’t really trust his guidance or ability to be a role model. I also wonder if the children, who are being given an education and were definitely raised to love books, will continue to see their uncle in a romanticized way as they grow older. Few people can spend their lives traveling around, shooting things, and hiring “native races” to carry their baggage along the way. If that’s most of the uncle’s experience of life, it’s not really going to prepare the children for the future. At the time E. Nesbit wrote this book, she couldn’t have known that, about 15 year later, Europe would erupt into World War I, and boys who were children around this time, like Oswald, Dicky, Noel, and H.O., may very well have ended up being soldiers and had many of their illusions about life shattered. (I have more to say about that when I cover the next book, The Wouldbegoods.) People talk about past people being a product of their times, and in this case, the uncle and his racial attitudes are both a product of this time of imperial Britain and his own wealth, and nobody outside that bubble would see either the way he does.

That brings up the question of what the author, E. Nesbit, really thinks about these things. Does she also share the uncle’s view’s of British imperialism and other races, or is she just portraying the uncle as a type of person she observed around her in society? It’s not entirely clear because everything in the story is presented from young Oswald’s point-of-view, and he is uncritical of these things and seems to have little idea of the larger picture of things. But, there are things in The Wouldbegoods that I think help clarify some aspects of that, some possibly intentionally and others possibly not.

That was a long rant/explanation, but I thought it was important to delve into the issues a little deeper. The tl;dr of it is that, while people were the products of their times, they were also the ones who made their times what they were for their own purposes, even if they didn’t think as deeply about it at the time as we do today, and what we observe about them and their behavior are clues to their personality, life circumstances, and motivations. Overall, I found the racial issues with this story to be aggravating distractions from what is otherwise a fun and funny story, and their removal from modern printings actually improves the story by removing these distractions from the plot. The modern printings are fine for kids to read.

The Movie Version

I watched the 1996 version of the movie, which emphasized the more serious portions of the book and included the character of a female doctor, who helped the family in place of the uncle from India. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as funny as the original book. I’m not sure about other movie versions.

Posted on by TracyC

A Meeting of Minds

A Meeting of Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1999.

This is the final book in the Minds series. Each book in the series begins shortly after the previous book ends, and this one starts only three weeks after the last book.

Princess Lenora and Prince Coren are still in Andilla for their impending wedding when, while simply walking down a hallway of the castle, they suddenly find themselves transported to a land of snow. The world in which they now find themselves is our world (which, I guess would be distant past of their world, the late 20th century). Disoriented and cold, Lenora and Coren go inside a shopping mall to get warm. At first, Coren thinks that Lenora has caused their present predicament (because, usually, she does, either consciously or unconsciously), but Lenora denies having anything to do with it.

At the time they’d been walking down the hallway, they’d been discussing the exhibition at the castle in honor of their upcoming wedding and Lenora’s desire for a better world. The exhibition was called “A Meeting of Minds” and designed to showcase the ways that different groups of people in their world live and what they envision as a perfect world. The entries in the exhibit were chosen as entries in a contest, and a panel of judges from different countries would choose winners from among them. The winning entries would be adopted as real laws in the hope of fulfilling Lenora’s wish of making the world a better place for everyone. What could go wrong? (Seriously, things in this world always go wrong when people try to enforce some vision of perfection, so what’s it going to be this time?) Could the exhibition have something to do with their present predicament?

Lenora and Coren briefly consider different possibilities, including the possibility that some unknown enemy has sent them to this strange place, but nothing really makes sense. Lenora has the uncomfortable feeling that something she’s done may have cause this problem after all, although she can’t think what it is. Either way, they are stuck in a strange land.

They stop a passing girl and ask them where they are, and she tells them that they’re in a mall called Portage Place. That doesn’t really explain much to Lenora and Coren, so the girl tells them to buy a map. Lenora and Coren don’t understand the concept of “buying” (in the last book, they didn’t know the word “economy”). When they try to ask her the name of her “world”, it turns out that the girl is an alien conspiracy theorist, wearing a shirt with a picture of an alien on it and the words “The Truth is Out There” (the slogan from the X-Files tv show). The girl is very excited, thinking that Lenora and Coren are space aliens. She tells them that they’re in Winnipeg on Earth and asks them where they’re from. Coren recognizes the name “Earth” as the old name for their world. This confirms that, although there are fantasy elements in these stories, Lenora and Coren are actually from the distant future of the Earth, although the three of them work out that they might actually be from a parallel universe of our Earth. However, her helpfulness ends when she suddenly seems to suspect them of being “Mindies” and making fun of her. Lenora and Coren don’t know what she’s talking about.

The two of them explore the mall, getting into trouble when they try to stop two girls from taking another child’s toy and end up having security called on them and not having money to pay for food in the mall food court. Fortunately, a couple of other young people in line offer to pay for their food. These young people, Barb and Thomas, seem to recognize them as Princess Lenora and Prince Coren, but strangely, Lenora and Coren learn that they think that they’re in costume and only pretending to be themselves. It slowly comes out that the authors of the book series live in Winnipeg and that there’s a fan convention in town for the books in which Lenora and Coren are fictional characters. (I’ve never actually heard of a convention specifically for this series of books, but I don’t live in Canada, so I can’t swear that it never happened. However, the characters later meet someone dressed as Spock at the convention, so it’s possible that this is supposed to be part of some larger book or sci-fi/fantasy-themed convention.)

Lenora and Coren don’t fully understand the concept of the fan convention, but Lenora sees it as a possible lead to what’s happening, so she insists on going to the convention center. At the convention center, Lenora and Coren encounter other people who are apparently trying to dress like they do and pretend to be them. Some of them even criticize what Lenora and Coren are wearing because their real outfits don’t agree with the fans’ interpretations of the characters. (Fandoms are like this in real life. The more someone likes something and spends time with it, the more they consider themselves an authority on it. They kind of are, but sometimes, fans get wrapped up in their own vision of what they’d like characters to be like that they kind of depart from the original story or get out of sync with the vision of the original authors. It’s almost like they mentally create an alternate reality of a world that was already fictional, which fits very well with the themes of this entire series.) Lenora and Coren think that they’re all very rude for criticizing the way they dress, telling them how they should talk to be in character, and thinking that Coren is a wimp or geek or that Lenora is annoying or arrogant, which some of them say right in front of them.

At this point, someone comments that Lenora sounds just like she does in the books, and the people at the convention start talking about all of the books in this series, which I’ve already reviewed. Finally, Lenora and Coren understand that these people know about them and are imitating them because they have read books about them. Coren is embarrassed when these fans start talking about some of his more embarrassing moments like they’re common knowledge. Lenora gets angry and decides that they need to talk to the authors. (Which seems to have been the goal of this book.)

Coren and Lenora get in line to talk to the authors of the books, but when they meet them, the authors also just think they’re fans of the books who are putting on a little skit for them. There’s some banter with the authors (including some inside jokes that Carol and Perry seem to have with each other, like how bad Perry’s handwriting apparently is), and the authors remark how much Lenora and Coren sound like their characters, although they don’t think they really look like them (which is interesting, as if they have a completely different vision of them in their minds). Lenora gets angry with them and accuses them of stealing from their lives to write their books, so she grabs some of the books the authors and signing and runs away with them.

As Lenora and Coren hide from security with their stolen books, they start reading about themselves. They find that the books do describe their previous adventures together, and they seem to capture some of what they were thinking and feeling at the time, but not everything is correct. In a twist that makes this book a little more interesting than it started out, not everything in the books they read is like the real-life Minds books. Lenora and Coren start noticing that Sayley plays a very prominent role and is described in glowing terms and that her favorite word, “scrumptious” appears frequently. Then, Lenora and Coren discover that one of the events at the convention is a worship service for the “Divine Sayley.” One of the other convention attendees tells them that the Sayley in the books was named after the Divine Sayley, who is a real figure in their world, an angelic-looking girl with divine powers, who seems to be a glowing version of their Sayley.

It seems that Lenora and Coren have discovered the source of this strange world and everything that has been happening to them, but how and why did Sayley do it? Or, did she really do it at all? And how can Lenora and Coren get home when their powers no longer work?

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

My Reaction and Spoilers:

First, I’d like to talk about why the authors wrote this book. It’s somewhat of a departure in theme and tone from the rest of the series, and because of that, it annoyed me. At first, I guessed that this book was just the authors’ excuse to have their own characters meet them in the story, to show off a few inside jokes for their own amusement, and to kind of toot their own horns. That sort of story annoys me. I don’t like it when authors do that. When I read a series that I like, I want to do it for the sake of the characters and the stories, not for the sake of the fandom, and any inside jokes the co-authors have with each other are not jokes I am personally in on, so I’m just not going to get the same charge out of them. (There’s an in-joke in this book about Perry Nodelman having some kind of special underwear. I don’t know what it is because it isn’t described, but I’ve seen lots of funny undershorts in those catalogs that come around Christmas, and I don’t really care which pair he owns. Younger readers would probably get more of a kick out of that bit of trivia than I do.)

However, I looked it up, and I found this explanation, written by one of the co-authors, Carol Matas:

Why We Wrote A Meeting of Minds

In thinking about the imaginative powers of the people of Gepeth, it suddenly struck us that they could have imagined us. After all, the Gepethians have the power to make whatever they imagine real, so why not this entire world of ours, including the city of Winnipeg and everyone who lives there–including us? Lenora and Coren are figments of our imaginations–but we might also be figments of theirs. In A Meeting of Minds, that is exactly what happens. Lenora and Coren and the authors Carol M and Perry N come face to face, as Lenora and Coren find themselves stuck without their powers in the city of Winnipeg and unable to get out. Who created whom? And will Lenora and Coren ever manage to escape this frightening city, worse than their worst nightmares? You’ll have to read the book to find out!

That explanation did make me feel a little better about the book, that more thought went into it than just a bunch of inside jokes for fans. The Minds books all focus on the power of the mind and the imagination and the nature of reality. A meta plot, like trying to decide if the authors created the characters or the characters created the author does fit with the theme of the theme of the series, almost like the end of Through the Looking Glass, where the reader is left to decide whether Alice dreamed the Red King or if Alice was just part of the Red King’s dream. However, by the end of this book, the question is resolved, as far as people in Lenora’s world is concerned. According to the story, Sayley really did create Winnipeg and everything in it, including the authors of this book and their books and fandom. There is something a little unsettled about the end of the book, but that’s not what it is.

I can’t talk about my full opinion of this story without some spoilers, though, so get ready: The current problem is actually a plot by Leni and Cori, the annoying doubles of Lenora and Coren created two books ago in the series, although it also turns out that their plot is part of the machinations of someone else.

It’s important to remember that Leni and Cori are basically Lenora and Coren themselves, sharing all of their memories up to the point in time when Lenora created them as separate people, but with twists to their personalities. She created Leni on purpose as a double of herself so she could go off and do what she wanted and people wouldn’t know she was missing, but she made Leni a distinct personality, who would like all of the boring things she didn’t like about managing a household and planning a wedding, so Leni would be happy to stay home and do those things while Lenora herself went adventuring. Cori was an accidental creation, when Lenora’s powers where acting erratically. She was in trouble and wished that Coren was there to help her, but she also wished that Coren was a braver, more action-oriented person, so Cori appeared as a kind of white knight figure to rescue her. Once Lenora created Leni and Cori, she didn’t have the heart to un-imagine them into non-existence because they are now distinct people and personalities by themselves.

Unfortunately, while Leni and Cori are pretty well-suited to each other, they both come with their annoying defects. Leni is frivolous and vapid, getting too wrapped up in petty details, like hair, clothes, and makeup, to care about larger issues. Cori is brave but reckless. He doesn’t have the real Coren’s thoughtfulness and rushes right into danger because his only solution to anything is fighting. Lenora and Coren come to appreciate each other more after seeing what their doubles are like and experiencing their annoying sides. Coren realizes that he doesn’t want Lenora to be like Leni, and Lenora stops complaining that Coren thinks too much. They don’t like their doubles, but the feeling is actually mutual. Because Leni and Cori have personalities that are almost opposite to Lenora and Coren, they find Lenora and Coren as annoying as Lenora and Coren find them, just for different reasons. Cori thinks that Coren is a wimp, and Leni thinks that Lenora is irresponsible and tasteless.

Part of the problem is that, while everyone knows that Leni and Cori are recently-created doubles instead of the real Lenora and Coren, Leni and Cori are still real people with all of the memories of Lenora and Coren. So, while the public and their royal parents acknowledge Lenora and Coren as their real children and the real princess and prince, Leni and Cori are angry and dissatisfied because they are no less “real” and have all the memories of being princess and prince. They are not treated as equals to Lenora and Coren, and their own parents don’t really consider them their children. Leni resents being treated like she’s secondary to Lenora, especially since Lenora made her to be the embodiment of all of the qualities that her parents wished she had. Leni is (for the most part) quiet and obedient, focused on spending all of her time looking the part of a princess, and rarely uses her powers in order maintain the Balance. While all of the preparations are going on for Lenora and Coren’s grand wedding, preparations that Lenora and Coren themselves don’t even find particularly interesting because they just don’t like all of the fuss and pageantry, Leni and Cori are also engaged to be married and actually want the pageantry of a grand wedding instead of the quieter ceremony being planned for them. With Lenora and Coren put out of the way, they can take over the wedding themselves, and Leni thinks that, once people get used to her instead of Lenora, they will think of her as an improvement and forget about Lenora.

Sayley did create the little world of Winnipeg that Lenora and Coren are trapped in as a display, her entry in the A Meeting of Minds contest, but Leni is the one who trapped Lenora and Coren in that world. In another twist, it turns out that Sayley created Winnipeg not as her example of the best world possible but as her example of the worst world possible, which she created for contrast. (Sorry, real world Winnipeg. It turns out that Sayley thinks snow is dreadful, but on the bright side, none of you will ever have to worship the Divine Sayley, which by itself makes real world Winnipeg immediately a better place for everyone.) When Sayley discovers what Leni and Cori have done, she wants to tell Coren’s parents, but Cori reads her mind and Leni banishes Sayley to her own exhibit along with Lenora and Coren.

By Sayley’s logic, what really makes her version of Winnipeg so bad is that nobody there believes in the power of the imagination. Everyone there likes to imagine things and they enjoy hearing about the power of imagination, which is why they are fans of Lenora and Coren, but none of them believe that imagination is real or that they can actually create the things they imagine. Their lack of belief in the powers of the mind is what prevents Lenora and Coren’s powers from working. Even though they worship Sayley as “divine”, Sayley says that they don’t really believe in her, they just consider her to be a symbol. Because of that, nobody there respects the real Sayley or listens to her. Sayley is unable to get the authors, Carol and Perry, to listen to them even though she tries to prove to them that she actually made them because she knows all about the embarrassing pair of underwear that Perry owns. Carol and Perry are still unconvinced and think that Sayley needs “help.”

Fortunately, there is one person in this world who Sayley allowed to have the power of imagination, Michael, and he believes that Sayley, Lenora, and Coren are all who they say they are. Michael figures out how to help them all to escape from the exhibit, but when they do, they still have to face down Leni and Cori and the evil force that is controlling them – Lenora’s old alter-ego and nemesis, Hevak.

The evil way that Leni behaves in this book is a clue that she isn’t quite herself. Normally, being well-behaved is a part of her personality, and her scruples would prevent her from doing any of the things she did, even though she secretly wanted to in the back of her mind. Hevak explains that, because Leni is another version of Lenora, he a part of her as well as Lenora. When Leni was feeling jealous and resentful about the wedding, it awakened him in her mind, and he used his influence to force her to overcome her normal inhibitions and do what she was thinking of doing. At first, I was thinking that having Hevak come back seemed like a bit of a cop-out and seemed a little like those cliched scenes in anime where the villain changes into their “final form” and reveals their “true power”, but that explanation actually does make sense for the way this world functions.

Just as Hevak and Lenora are poised for their ultimate battle, however, it all just kind of comes to an end. Defeating Hevak proves easier than it seems like it should because Hevak himself has changed, even though it doesn’t really seem like it from the rest of the book. What Hevak decides is that he’s been through just about everything – he tried to create perfection and failed, people have called him evil (because he does evil things), he tried to be perfectly good, and for a long period, he was stuck in a state of nothingness. Now, he wonders what it’s all for. He hasn’t really accomplished much, and he doesn’t really see the point in continuing on this way. He’s thought about it so much that he’d really rather return to nothingness and not have to think about anything. It’s a little anti-climactic for how much of a nemesis Hevak is.

However, Lenora can’t bring herself to imagine him as not existing permanently because he was always an extension of herself, so instead, she takes Michael’s suggestion and sends him to Winnipeg, which gives the authors a chance to make a few more jokes about life in Winnipeg. Michael says that there are many unimaginative people there who spend time not doing much or thinking much, so without his powers, Hevak will fit in nicely and feel comfortable. Sayley promises to make Winnipeg a little nicer than it is now without changing its character completely, giving it other seasons besides winter and making it part of a much larger world, so people in Winnipeg won’t feel trapped there if they don’t like the climate and can experience some variety. Unfortunately, she also says that, since Winnipeg was supposed to be her worst world, she’s going to give the other seasons a downside, too, which is why she decides to invent mosquitos for Winnipeg’s summer. (So, now we all know who to blame.) Michael isn’t worried because he says that people in Winnipeg are tough. I kind of liked Hevak’s banishment to Winnipeg for the humor value, even though it felt like a rather easy wrap-up to the story.

This is the final book in the Minds series, and from the way it ends, I think there could be room for another one after it, even though one was never written. The book ends with Lenora and Coren’s actual wedding, stopping just as the ceremony ends. It appears that they are going to live happily ever after with the form of perfection they’ve selected taking effect as the ceremony ends, but exactly what that means is never clarified, probably because perfection is a difficult thing to imagine and maybe complete perfection is impossible to achieve. Lenora and Coren are both happy, although Coren does have some slight misgivings about whether the perfection is going to be too perfect in some way. (Remember, this series is all about Balance.) However, he brushes his worries aside to complete the ceremony. Then, we don’t know what happens after that. Is their new perfect world everything they’ve ever wanted and keep everyone happy forever, or will there be new, unforeseen complications after their marriage? Would new, unforeseen complications actually make Lenora happier than a completely settled world because she actually likes excitement and new problems to solve? Could that actually be her version of perfection? Is there a chance that Hevak will return from Winnipeg or has he finally found his true niche there, shoveling snow? There are no answers to these questions because the series is over, so we’ll never know, but I’ll leave you with a final thought – this world is all about imagination and the power of the imagination to create, so if you imagine something after this, that’s what you’ve created.

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

The Vanishing Scarecrow

The Vanishing Scarecrow by Phyllis A. Whitney, 1971.

Joan Lang and her mother are moving from their town in Connecticut to Rainbow Island, where Joan’s Great Uncle Agate Benson owned his own amusement park. However, the move is sad because Great Uncle Agate’s death in a skiing accident has so closely followed Joan’s father’s death from a long illness. Joan and her mother knew that they were going to have to move to a smaller house because they could no longer afford their bigger one, and Uncle Agate’s sudden death means that they will inherit his house on Rainbow Island and the amusement park that goes with it. Joan and Uncle Agate had been writing letters to each other since her father’s death, and he made her feel less lonely, so Joan knows that she will miss him, but she is looking forward to seeing the amusement park that he had described to her.

However, the terms of Uncle Agate’s will are unusual, and his lawyer is vague on some aspects of them. What they know is that they must live at Rainbow Island and manage the amusement park for three years in order to gain full ownership. If they decide to leave before that time, Uncle Agate has another plan for the amusement park, but the lawyer refuses to tell them what it is immediately.

When they arrive at Rainbow Island, they meet Mrs. Fuller, who works at the amusement park’s gift shop and lives there with her two sons, Peter and Kent. Mrs. Fuller hopes that Kent and Joan will be friends because they’re close in age. Kent doesn’t seem particularly friendly at first, and when Joan confronts him about that, he says that he’s just trying to figure out what she and her mother are going to be like. Kent, like other people who live and work at Rainbow Island, was very attached to Uncle Agate. He appreciated his vision and imagination, and he misses him now that he’s gone. He has trouble believing that things will ever be like they were with Uncle Agate.

Mrs. Fuller and Kent both mention strange things that have been happening at the amusement park recently, including a scarecrow that frightened Mrs. Riddell, the wife of Wilson Riddell, who manages the park, but she says that she’d better let Mr. Riddell explain the situation. When Joan and her mother go to Uncle Agate’s old house to begin unpacking their things, Mr. Riddell comes to talk to them. He doesn’t seem particularly welcoming, either. Joan’s mother tries to ask him about the scarecrow incident, and he explains that someone, possibly a teenage prankster, has been pulling tricks around the park lately. Earlier that day, someone ran right through the Riddell house, terrifying Mrs. Riddell. Mrs. Riddell is described as being a very nervous person who is somewhat unwell, so Mr. Riddell seems uncertain whether his wife actually saw a person dressed as a scarecrow, as she described, or if that was her imagination. Earlier, she also claimed to see a witch. The idea of someone in a scarecrow costume is plausible because the amusement park includes a field of scarecrows, and they do have a spare scarecrow costume that they’ve used in the past to make it look like one of the scarecrows has come to life, to give guests a bit of a thrill. However, the employee who normally wears the costume hasn’t worn it for some time, and it seems like the recent scarecrow sightings are the work of a prankster.

As Kent shows Joan around the amusement park, they meet up with Peter in the Wizard’s Fortress, where he points out that someone has been messing around with the dioramas of historical scenes, moving some of the little figures around to scenes where they don’t belong. In the dungeon of the fortress, Joan meets up with Mr. Riddell’s daughter, Sheri, who is also about her age. Sheri has found the costume the scarecrow was wearing under some straw. Joan isn’t sure that she trusts Sheri because of the strange way she acts and how she seems to be sneaking around, keeping secrets, and playing weird pranks and tricks.

Could Sheri have something to do with the mysterious scarecrow, or could it be Emery Holt, the man who did odd jobs for Uncle Agate and sometimes wore the scarecrow costume as an act in the park? Another suspect could be Jud Millikin, an escaped convict who used to live in the area and who still has family living nearby. Joan and her mother hear people whispering about him, wondering if he might have come back to see his sick daughter, although people say it isn’t likely that he’d show his face in town since the police are looking for him. But why would he want to sabotage the Rainbow Island amusement park? Joan considers that there might be an answer closer to home when she learns that the Riddells and the Fullers don’t really get along, and there seems to be a silent power struggle between them for control of the park. Either of the families might want the other to leave, plus Joan and her mother, so they can be in charge.

Joan finds a message and an audio recording left behind by Uncle Agate for her, in which he seems to have had a premonition of his impending death and saying that the reason why he wants Joan and her mother to manage the park with Mr. Riddell is that the park needs someone with a fresh imagination to keep creating new exhibits and keep the park interesting for new generations of children. Joan wants to find out who is sabotaging the park and to keep Uncle Agate’s vision for the park alive, but her mother isn’t so sure that the situation is going to work for them.

Joan does have a fantastic imagination. She loves writing and making up stories, and she finds the atmosphere of the amusement park inspiring. However, Joan’s mother worries sometimes that Joan lives too much in her stories and doesn’t face up to reality enough. When Joan accuses her of not liking her stories, her mother says it’s not that, it’s just that writers also need a grounding in real life and the real world, and that it’s not good to use fantasies as a way of ignoring real life. She says that Uncle Agate was like that. Uncle Agate and his sister were orphaned from a young age, and while his sister was adopted by a family, Uncle Agate remained in the orphanage for the rest of his youth. When he grew up, he became successful in the toy industry, which was how he gained enough money and expertise to start his amusement park. However, Joan’s mother believes that much of what he did with the park was trying to live out childhood fantasies from his deprived youth and forget the hard realities of it. Joan’s mother says that she finds the real world outside of the amusement park more compelling, and she doesn’t want Joan to live too much in fantasy.

Joan is attracted to fantasy, but she’s realistic enough to know that there won’t be any hope for the park until she learns the true identity of the mysterious scarecrow that is trying to sabotage it. In the recorded message he left for Joan, Uncle Agate refers to a “right place” where Joan will find instructions that will tell her what to do. As Joan explores the the amusement park, familiarizing herself with the attractions and exhibits, she searches for the place that Uncle Agate referred to. Along the way, she has frightening encounters with someone dressed as a witch and the dangerous scarecrow among the regular figures in the exhibits.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The atmosphere of the story is great, and the author does a good job of making everyone Joan meets look like a potential villain or accomplice. All through the book, I kept changing my mind about who the real scarecrow was, and there are red herrings in the form of other people dressing up in costumes. Joan is never sure who to trust. There is a major twist toward the end of the book that turns the entire situation on its head. The rest of the ending after the scarecrow’s identity was revealed seemed a little abrupt to me, but the story has a good overall message.

At the beginning of the story, Joan does actually look at the amusement park on Rainbow Island as a kind of fantastic sanctuary from her problems, where she can escape from the sad loss of her father and uncle and the problems she’s been having at school. However, she learns that the amusement park isn’t really a sanctuary because it has problems of its own and the people associated with it also have their problems. However, these are problems that Joan is more motivated to solve because they are more exciting than her problems back home, and the stakes are high.

Joan and her mother have a frank discussion about facing up to life’s problems, and Joan points out that her mother’s impulse to run away from the park isn’t that different from her reluctance to face up to her problems with her schoolwork. Joan’s mother doesn’t find the park as interesting as Joan does, so she’s not as interested in trying to save it as Joan is. It’s similar to the way that Joan was unmotivated to work harder at school because it bored her, it was less imaginative than the creative writing she likes to do, and she was preoccupied with other major changes in her life. Joan’s mother acknowledges the truth of that, that it’s easier to try to solve a problem when you’re more motivated to work on it, and the two of them agree that, whatever else they do with their lives, they can’t just abandon the park without trying to catch the saboteur.

All of the characters in the story get new perspectives on their lives from this adventure, seeing how the park and their problems fit into a much bigger picture of life. Joan comes to understand that there are some problems that she’ll still have to face up to, like her school problems, no matter what else happens, and she sees that understanding the real problems that real people have is what will give her characters and stories greater depth.