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The Runaway Bunny

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd, 1942.

A little bunny tells his mother that he’s thinking about running away, but his mother assures him that, no matter where he goes or what he does, she would always come after him because he’s her little bunny, and she loves him.

The pictures where the little bunny talks about all of his ideas for running away and evading his mother and where his mother explains what she would do to follow him are in black-and-white.

However, there are large, full color pictures after each of these sections showing what would happen as the mother follows her little bunny.

The little bunny’s plans for running away become increasingly imaginative and outlandish, from going up a mountain and joining the circus to transforming himself into a fish, a bird, or a sailboat.

No matter what the little bunny thinks of for running away and changing himself into something else, his mother assures him that she would find a way to come after him and be there for him. In the end, the little bunny decides that he might as well stay with his mother, just as they are.

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

My Reaction

This is a very well-known and much-loved book about parental love and the lengths that parents will go for their children. The mother bunny is determined to be there for her child, even when the child wants to run away. We don’t know why the little bunny was talking about running away from his mother, and without that, it seems just like the little bunny was just trying to provoke his mother to find out how much his mother loves him. When she tells him all the things she would do to reach him if he ran away, he seems reassured and content to remain her little bunny.

This book was originally published during WWII and is a calm and reassuring story that probably comforted many children living through unsettling times. It has never been out of print since its original publication.

The author and illustrator of this book also later wrote and illustrated Goodnight Moon. The scene where the little bunny imagines himself as a boy in a house and his mother says that she would still be his mother reminds me of the illustrations in that book, and I wonder if the mother and child rabbits in that book came from this one.

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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

The Neverending Story

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, 1979, 1983.

Bastian Balthazar Bux has problems. He’s smaller and fatter than the other boys, no good at sports or fighting, and not even a particularly good student.  Because of this, other kids tease him, bullies chase him, and the one time that he tried to talk back to them, the mean kids shoved him into a trash can, so he was afraid to ever try it again.  One day, on the way to school, he seeks sanctuary from his bullies in an old bookshop that belongs to Carl Conrad Coreander.  Bastian loves books more than anything.  In fact, his love of books and his imagination are his only apparent strengths at this point in his life.

Coreander doesn’t like children, and as soon as he sees Bastian, he makes it clear that the boy isn’t welcome in his shop, that he doesn’t carry books for children, and that he won’t sell Bastian any books for adults. Coreander says that children are just noisy and make messes and ruin books.  Bastian protests that not all children are like that, and the two them talk about why Bastian is there and why the other children bully him.  Bastian says that one of the reasons why the other kids think he’s odd is that he likes to make things up, like imagining places and characters and odd names. He rarely shares these things because nobody else seems interested. Coreander asks what his parents have to say about all of this, and Bastian reveals that his mother is dead and his father doesn’t take much interest in him or things that happen to him in his daily life.  Coreander is rather condescending to Bastian but also strangely interested in some of the details about him and his life.

When Coreander gets up to take a phone call, Bastian finds himself looking at the book that Coreander was reading when he came into the shop.  It’s called The Neverending Story, a title which captures Bastian’s imagination at once because he always hates it when a book he likes ends. The book seems to call to Bastian, and he suddenly feels like he has to have it.  Because Coreander has already made it clear that he won’t sell any books to Bastian, Bastian simply snatches up the book and leaves the shop with it.

After he’s out of the shop, Bastian suddenly feels guilty for stealing the book, even though he still feels compelled to have it and read it. He knows that he can’t take the book home with him because, even though his father doesn’t notice much, he would notice if Bastian showed up at home when he’s supposed to be at school.  Bastian knows that he’s already terribly late for school, but he can’t bring himself to go to class, especially not with a stolen book.  Desperately, he tries to think of a place to go.  Then, he remembers that his school has an attic.  Hardly anybody goes up there, and even those who do don’t go there very often.  He can hide there for a while and read.

Without giving much thought to how long he’s going to hide and what he’s going to do for food when he gets hungry, Bastian hurries up to the attic of the school, locks himself in, and starts to read The Neverending Story.

From this point on, most of the book is the story in the book Bastian stole, but at the same time, it’s also a story about Bastian himself.  There are periods when things in the story remind Bastian of things happening in his life or times when he pauses to think about what his class at school would be doing at this time without him, things that he’s glad to be missing himself.  However, gradually, Bastian himself starts to enter the story.

The Neverending Story Begins

The story in Bastian’s book takes place in the magical land of Fantastica.  The first characters we meet are messengers who are on their way to see the Childlike Empress who rules the land.  Within that land are many fantastical people and creatures who inhabit countries of their own, but strange things are happening here that have nothing to do with the usual magic of Fantastica.  A small group of messengers who happen to meet each other talk about what they’ve observed and why they need to talk to the Childlike Empress.  Whole sections of their countries and even some of the people and creatures who normally inhabit them have simply disappeared.  By “disappeared”, they mean that nothing is left in their place.  Whenever people try to look at the areas that used to be there, they see absolutely nothing, as though they have all gone blind when looking in their direction.  Nobody knows why this is happening, and people are panicking.

The Childlike Empress lives in a beautiful tower.  When the messengers arrive there, they discover that so many messengers have arrived from every corner of Fantastica that they have to make appointments and wait their turn to talk to the Childlike Empress.  Everyone seems to have the same problem, and to make matters worse, word has spread that the Childlike Empress is ill, and the doctors can’t seem to understand the nature of her illness and have no idea what to do to help her.  The messengers wonder if the Childlike Empress’s illness could have something to do with all the strange things that have been happening.  All of the creatures in the kingdom know that the very existence of their kingdom depends on the well-being of the Childlike Empress.  If anything ever happened to her, the rest of them would simply cease to exist.

At this point in the story, Bastian is reminded of his mother’s death and stops to think about her.  He remembers being at the hospital with his father while his mother was undergoing an operation to try to save her life, but unfortunately, it was unsuccessful.  After that point, Bastian’s father changed, becoming mentally and emotionally withdrawn, so it seems as though Bastian not only lost his mother completely but also part of his father.  His father continues to look after him physically and even gives him nice things, like a bicycle, but he rarely takes much notice of his son’s day-to-day life, making Bastian feel almost like he isn’t there himself.  His father no longer talks to him about ordinary, everyday things, and he’s always preoccupied with his grief.

The doctors trying to treat the Childlike Empress say that she doesn’t have any obvious symptoms of illness.  For some reason, she simply seems to be fading away, making it seem likely that her malady is tied to the fading away of Fantastica itself.  Chiron the centaur, the greatest of the healers, says that the Childlike Empress has said that someone must go on a quest to find the solution to her problem. She doesn’t say what the solution is, but she has chosen the hero who will go on this quest by name and has given Chiron her medallion to give to this hero.  The Childlike Empress’s amulet, Auryn, takes the form of the twined snakes (it’s a sort of elaborate ouroboros) that appears on the cover of the book that Bastian is reading.

Chiron takes the medallion to the Greenskins, a people who resemble nomadic Native Americans who hunt purple buffalo, to find the hero called Atreyu.  Atreyu turns out to be a 10-year-old boy, and Chiron is upset at first that a child so young has been given this important mission.  Even though he is doubtful that a child could save the Childlike Empress, he has to trust the empress’s decision.  He explains the situation to Atreyu and his people, and Atreyu sets off on his quest, although he has little to go on.

Bastian comes to identify somewhat with Atreyu, who is an orphan, raised communally by his people.  In a way, Atreyu is like what Bastian himself wishes he was.  Atreyu is also an orphan, but where Bastian feels neglected by his remaining parent and has no one else to rely on, Atreyu is regarded as the “son of all” his people, with everyone raising him.  Bastian wishes that he could feel like he could rely on everyone around him to care about him.  Atreyu is also strong and brave, which Bastian is not, or at least, he doesn’t feel like he is.

Atreyu travels far and asks everyone where he stops if they know how to help the Childlike Empress, but no one does.  However, in a dream, a purple buffalo tells him that he must visit an ancient woman called Morla, who lives in the Swamp of Sorrows.  She is the oldest creature in Fantastica, and she will know the answer.  Atreyu loses his beloved horse in the Swamp of Sorrows because the horse is overtaken by a dreadful depression and cannot save himself from being dragged down into the swamp.  (This was the worst part of the movie version of this story for me as a kid although somewhat less traumatic in the book.)  Atreyu is protected from the depression by the Childlike Empress’s amulet and is able to reach Morla.

Morla turns out to be a giant and ancient tortoise.  She does know the answer to the problem, but Atreyu has trouble persuading her to explain it at first because Morla is so old that she has come to feel like life is meaningless and doesn’t really care if she and everyone else disappears or not.  Fortunately, Atreyu’s arguments with her revive enough of her interest for her to talk to him. Morla says that the Childlike Empress has always been young because her life isn’t measured by time like others’ lives.  The Childlike Empress’s life is measured by names.  She has had many, many names over the years, most of them forgotten now, and even Morla doesn’t know what her current name is.  In order for her life and existence to be renewed, the Childlike Empress needs a new name.  Atreyu asks Morla how she can get one, and Morla says that she doesn’t know who can give her a new name, only that it can’t be anyone from Fantastica.  Atreyu must visit the Southern Oracle to find the answer.

At this point, Bastian thinks it’s too bad that he can’t give the Childlike Empress her name because thinking up unusual names is something that he’s really good at, and this might be the one place where his talent has a use and people who would welcome it.  However, the things that are happening in the story are so scary that Bastian is also grateful that he is safe where he is, just reading about them.

Bastian reads that Atreyu wanders out of the swamp on foot. He doesn’t know where he’s going, and he lost all of his supplies with his horse.  Then, Bastian hears the clock chime and knows that school is out for the day. As the other children leave the school, Bastian has to decide what to do. He knows that he really should go home and own up to his father about stealing the book, but when he gets up to go, he has the feeling like he has to keep reading, to finish what he’s started, like Atreyu, who is still fulfilling his mission in spite of hardship.  Bastian feels a little proud of making a difficult decision because he’s not running away from his responsibilities so much as continuing a quest of his own.  He knows that he must finish that book. Indeed, he must because the existence of Fantastica now depends on him.

As he continues reading and following Atreyu’s adventures, Bastian begins to feel more like the story isn’t just a story, that there is something more to it. When Atreyu reaches the Oracle, which communicates only through rhyme, it tells Atreyu that nobody in Fantastica can give the Childlike Empress a new name because the truth is that all of them are only characters in a book who exist as they are because of the needs of the story.  The people of Fantastica didn’t invent their world, they don’t create it as it exists, and they don’t have any real power to change anything, even a name.  All of those powers belong to humans who live in what they call the “Outer World.”  The Oracle says that generations of human children have read the book that contains all of Fantastica, and they are the ones who have used their powerful imaginations to give the Childlike Empress new names, over and over.  The problem is that the book has not been read by anyone for too long and children tend not to believe in stories like theirs anymore, so it has been too long since the Childlike Empress was given her last name. The memories of all the names she’s been given have faded, so she is losing her ability to maintain her existence and the existence of all of Fantastica.  They need a human child with the ability to believe in Fantastica and think of a new name to rename the Childlike Empress.  They need Bastian … if Bastian can manage to believe in himself as the hero of his story.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, plus a computer game about it and the theme song from the movie). It was originally written in German, and the version I have is the English translation. There is a movie version from the 1980s that is very well-known among people who were young then and fantasy fans. There are also two movie sequels that aren’t as well-known.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I saw the movie version of this book long before I ever got hold of a copy and way before I was old enough to read a book that long.  The movie was big in the 1980s, when I was a young child, and it has a magical and very 1980s theme song that was also used as a cultural reference in the show Stranger Things.  I’m actually attached to that song because it’s one of the sounds of my early childhood. For reference, I’m younger than all the Stranger Things kid characters are supposed to be, even Erica, but old enough to have memories of the time period of that show. The mall scenes in that show are practically right out of my childhood. Those electronicized ‘80s songs, bright-colored clothes and clothes with paint splatter designs, Cold War with two Germanies – East and West – these things were all part of my early life, and that is the time period when this book was popular and the movie was new.  As Stranger Things points out, things like fantasy books and movies and playing Dungeons and Dragons were all considered part of nerd culture back in the day.  To a certain extent, they still are, but Harry Potter brought a renewed interest in and popularization of fantasy books in the late 1990s.

The story is about the power of imagination and the roles that fantasy play in human lives.  The story actually gets deep in places about the philosophy of stories and how people use them.  It explains that humans fear stories, particularly fantasy stories, because, when fantasy characters get out in the real world and take over people’s minds, they can cause madness and delusions or be used as lies by unscrupulous people to fool and manipulate others.  They don’t use the word “propaganda”, but that’s part of what they imply, and it’s a fitting concern for the Cold War era when this story was written.  Madness can also be a real risk for people who can’t separate reality from fantasy, as shown in Bastian’s further adventures in Fantastica, described below.  Humans are creatures that live and function in the real world, and while we sometimes venture into the realm of fantasy and stories, we can lose ourselves if we don’t know how to keep the two separate in our minds.  So, what’s a human supposed to do?

The book suggests the idea that people can’t simply avoid fantasy entirely for fear of the effect that it might have on them, like people who refuse to allow children to read fantasy books.  Even though people like that might think they’re smart for avoiding “lies” and “delusions”, but the problem with that is that there are many types of delusions that people have, even in their everyday lives, and people who are convinced that they’re being thoroughly realistic and avoiding any sort of fantasy actually make themselves vulnerable to lies and delusions of other kinds.  Anybody who’s lived through the era of accusations of “fake news” should be able to grasp that concept.  A real world fact is that people use stories of all kinds to explain and understand the world around them.  We all use stories, and those stories have shades of emotion and varying degrees of elements of fiction.  The principal of Fantastica is that fantasy is fine when people approach it as fantasy, coming to it willingly in the full knowledge that it is fantasy.  Even in fantasy stories there can be elements of realism, such as the reality of human emotions, but people can pick out the real bits from the fictional ones when they know what they’re dealing with and are willing participants, not having it pushed at them by people who are actively seeking to trick them. 

People with broad, real-world knowledge, who are used to stories of various kinds in the real world, get accustomed to distinguishing between different types of stories and recognizing fictional elements from false ones.  There have been a couple of times when I’ve actively pointed out to people on my neighborhood website who shared “shocking” stories about horrific kidnapping attempts of kids or young women that those stories were false.  The local police have even said that they were false, but I knew that they were even before getting that confirmed with the local police.  How?  I’ve seen them before, or ones very much like them.  Honestly, they were basically the type of kidnapping stories that appear on Wattpad, the infamous Internet home of badly-misspelled stories of that ilk, and because I read fanfiction, I’ve seen them before in all their grammatically-incorrect glory.  I recognized elements of the fake stories from ones that I read before in the full knowledge that they were completely fictional and probably written by teenagers, most of whom don’t understand how chloroform actually works.  I could see their ridiculously complicated premises anywhere and go, “Yep, it’s one of those stories.”  The people attempting to share these stories as shocking things that their neighbors need to know about have probably never read Wattpad or any similar amateur fiction and equally don’t know how chloroform works.  They just experienced a feeling of shock when reading these stories on Facebook (yes, that is where they said they got them) and did what they automatically do when they feel shocked about something, passed it on to someone else without asking someone more knowledgeable.  Some of the other people reading their posts on the neighborhood website called the local police to check their stories, but the original posters did not do that before posting them. It seems that never crossed their minds.  I’m telling you this because I’m pointing out that I’m immune to this particular kind of shocking fake kidnapping story because I’ve seen it before, I’m familiar with the general format, and I actually did look up what chloroform does and how it works because I was curious.  I’ve sort of inoculated myself against this sort of story.  I don’t feel shocked when I see it.  I roll my eyes. 

I’m not saying that it’s completely impossible to fool me on anything because human beings are limited, and I can’t say that I’ve heard every story out there, but I’ve heard quite a lot of them.  I’m a voracious, long-term reader in different genres, fictional and non-fiction, badly-written and award-winning.  I don’t fear fiction or fantasy or even “fake news” because I’ve seen it before in various forms.  I know how to verify information and already have reliable sources of information lined up on various subjects.  Above all, I have the knowledge that I’m always responsible for myself and in control of myself and that no amount of fiction or “fake news” can ever make me do anything without my consent.  Even people under hypnosis can’t be made to do anything that is truly against their will or morals, and I’m pretty comfortable with my sense of self and what I’m willing or not willing to do.  (By the way, I got the Pfizer vaccine back in April 2021 and the Moderna booster in December 2021, and I’m perfectly fine. It’s not poison, unlike some of those idiot horse cures some people try when they’re so afraid of being tricked by some people that they leave themselves open to being tricked by other people, who can see their real fears. It’s also not magnetic.  I used to stick coins to my skin way back in elementary school in the early 1990s, although I preferred the trick where you roll a coin down your forehead and nose. Sticking coins to your skin works because of sweat, not magnetism, like that trick of sticking a spoon to your nose because you licked it first. This is a digression, but honestly, how does anyone get out of childhood without knowing how that works? I wasn’t aware that anybody who had ever been to school with other kids in their childhood hadn’t seen this stuff before.) Fear is one element I know that can cloud people’s perceptions about what’s real and what’s not, and while I’m naturally a nervous person in a lot of ways, this isn’t something that scares me at all.  I’m not afraid of being tricked.  I never was.  I was a fan of magic tricks at a young age, and that led me to read about magic and the tricks that people use. None of them scare me because I’ve done them before myself and know how they work.  It’s like that with fiction, too.  Been there, done that, seen it, know it, and I urge other people to do the same.  This kind of mental vaccination works as well as the other kind.  At least, it always has for me.

Book vs. Movie

There are many incidents in the book that are not in the movie, although some appeared in the first movie sequel.  In fact, the original movie really only covers about the first half the book.  Rather than ending with Bastian giving the Childlike Empress her new name, Moon Child, while she and Atreyu are at the Ivory Tower where she lives, Bastian hesitates because he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do, if he’s really chosen the right name, if he’s really going to enter Fantastica and how, and above all, if a small, weak boy like himself can really be a hero.  Seeing that his indecision could ruin Fantastica forever, the Childlike Empress finds a way to put the story into a loop, repeating over and over, making it truly a never-ending story until Bastian finally names her.

After Bastian names her, Moon Child gives him the last grain of sand from Fantastica, like in the end of the movie, so he can rebuild it.  At first, Bastian isn’t sure how, but she explains to him that he can do it with his wishes. He has as many wishes as he wants, and he can wish for anything and everything.  Bastian feels overwhelmed at the thought that he can think of anything, and that makes it difficult to think of anything because he doesn’t know where to start. Yet, Bastian must make wishes to rebuild Fantastica.  From here, I’ll basically describe Bastian’s continuing adventures in Fantastica, although I’m going to leave out a lot of detail and individual incidents and characters because there’s far too much to describe:

Bastian’s Continuing Adventures

To get him started, Moon Child asks Bastian what made him hesitate before to name her.  Bastian explains how he doesn’t look or feel like a hero should. He thinks that heroes should be like princes, handsome and strong, not small, weak, and fat like himself.  With this first wish, Bastian becomes a handsome prince.  Moon Child gives Bastian the Auryn, which gives him the power to control things in Fantastica and yet keep him safe from all dangers at the same time.  Using it, Bastian makes himself strong and brave as well as handsome, and his wishes take him on new adventures through new lands, creating things as he goes.

Then, his wish for companionship leads him to find Atreyu.  He is glad to be reunited with him, but Atreyu remembers Bastian’s real appearance because he saw him in a mirror before.  By now, Bastian’s memories of his former self are fading.  The people of Fantastica appreciate Bastian’s ability to make new stories because they lack that ability themselves, but it starts getting out of hand.  Bastian’s creations start getting out of his control, and Atreyu realizes that Bastian is losing more and more of his memories, forgetting who he really is and what his home is really like.  As Bastian loses touch with his real self, he also gets confused about what he really wants, and his confusion is causing his wishes to produce uncontrollable results. To make matters worse, Bastian is losing his desire to return home along with his memories of home.  His friends are distressed because they know that Bastian must return home in order to inspire other children to come to Fantastica.  If he doesn’t, other children won’t come and give Moon Child new names in the future, and Fantastica will be in danger once again.  Basically, Bastian has lost of the plot of his own story.

Persuaded by his friends, Bastian makes a wish that will help him figure out what to do: he wants to see the Childlike Empress/Moon Child again.  Although Atreyu and Falkor wanted him to make a new choice to guide their quest, they’re not convinced this is the right one because one of the rules of Fantastica is that nobody can see her more than once.  Bastian says that he thinks he’s different because he’s human and not from Fantastica, and he’s already seen her more than once.  As they continue their journey, Bastian continues losing more and more of himself, getting offended with his friends because they treat him like a child, forgetting that’s what he actually is.

At one point, an evil character separates Bastian from his friends by feeding his vanity.  As Bastian loses more and more of his memories, he becomes uncertain about whether or not he really wants to continue his journey to see Moon Child, forgetting his original reason for wanting to see her.  They do finally arrive at the Ivory Tower, but the Childlike Empress is not there, and nobody knows where she is.  At the evil character’s urging, Bastian tries to make himself emperor in her place, thinking that she has left Fantastica forever and that the reason she gave him Auryn is because she wanted him to be her successor.  However, the other residents of Fantastica know that it’s not right.  Atreyu and Falkor end up leading the forces of Fantastica against Bastian to get the amulet, return his memories, and put things right.  I don’t like stories where people turn against their friends like Bastian does because it’s pretty uncomfortable.  In this case, many people are killed in the battle against Bastian, Bastian wounds Atreyu, and the Ivory Tower collapses.

At first, Bastian blames Atreyu for his own failures and tries to go after him to get revenge, but along the way, he stumbles on a town occupied with former emperors and empresses of Fantastica.  A little monkey explains to Bastian what the town is and who the people there are.  All of the people in the town were people who tried to take over Fantastica but lost their minds in the effort.  They’re humans and have lost their memories and now do crazy things.  Because they’ve lost their minds and memories, they’re unable to wish themselves home.  This is what happens to humans who lose their desire to go home to the real world.  Readers can look at it as people who become detached from reality and live in a madness based on fantasy.  Humans need reality to keep themselves grounded and sane, and they need their memories and their pasts to help themselves build a future.

The monkey shows Bastian how he taught the crazy ex-emperors a game where they spell words with alphabet blocks.  Most of what they create is gibberish, but the monkey says that, when they’ve played for a hundred years or so, they’ll occasionally spell out a poem, and since they play endlessly, they’ll eventually spell out all of the works of literature, poking fun at the theory that monkeys pounding endlessly on typewriters could do the same thing.  Bastian is horrified and questions the monkey about how he can avoid this fate.  Auryn is a liability because it’s removing the memories that Bastian needs to return home, yet the monkey says that Bastian will need Auryn in order to return home.

As Bastian journeys further, he finds a land where people always work together and use the word “we” instead of “I.”  It’s inspiring in a way, but Bastian is troubled because, in a land where nobody is distinctive or special, everyone is easily replaceable in the work force, and nobody seems to really love anybody else as an individual.  Here, Bastian realizes that his true wish, one that he has long forgotten, is not to be the strongest or handsomeness or most powerful but simply to be loved.  He wants to be loved for the person he really is, even with all of his imperfections.  The problem is that Bastian is uncertain now about who he really is because he’s changed so much since he came to Fantastica and has lost his memories of who he used to be.

Journeying further yet, Bastian meets a singing woman.  He has a strange feeling like he wants to run to her, hug her, and call her “Mama,” but he knows that this woman is not his mother.  He remembers that his mother is dead, and she was a very different woman from this one.  This is a plant woman who grows fruit herself.  The strange woman gives him some fruit to eat and begins telling Bastian a story.  The story she tells is Bastian’s own story, the story of how he came to Fantastica, how he gave the Childlike Empress her name, and how he had made wishes that were both good and bad and lost himself along the way.  The house where the woman is called the House of Change, which not only changes itself but changes people who are there.  The woman says that Bastian’s problem is that he always wanted to be someone else other than what he was, but at the same time, he didn’t want to change himself.

During his time in the House of Change, Bastian becomes like a child again, and the plant woman, Dame Eyola, is motherly to him, fulfilling the need for love that Bastian has had for so long.  He feels guilty about all the things that he’s done since he arrived in Fantastica, but Eyola comforts him and advises him to seek the Water of Life.  However, when he does, she cautions him that it will be his last wish.  Bastian is afraid because he knows now that every time he wishes, he will lose a part of himself.  Still, Dame Eyola fills up him with her motherly love, and Bastian finds himself needing less love himself and wishing that he also had the ability to love someone.  This is his last wish.  With that wish, Bastian forgets his parents, his last memory aside from his own name.  Dame Eyola says that Bastian will be able to give that kind of love to others when he has drunk the Water of Life, and he will only be able to return to his own world when he brings some of that Water of Life back to his world with him.

To get to the Water of Life, Bastian must pass through a picture gallery of forgotten dreams and find one of his own forgotten dreams.  His wish is to love someone, but to do that, he must choose someone in particular to love and forget the last person he still remembers – himself. 

Bastian has to dig to find his forgotten dream because it’s buried, but when he finds it, it’s a dream of his father, sad and trapped in ice, begging him to help free him.  Bastian’s troubled relationship with his father has been at the heart of most of his feelings, but now, he finds himself wanting to help his father.  He now has the power to reach the Water of Life.  There is another problem that he has to deal with before he can reach the Water of Life, and he encounters Atreyu and Falklor again. 

The Water of Life is inside Auryn itself, and Bastian reaches it when he finally takes it off.  When the three of them get to the Water of Life, he has trouble reaching it because he’s lost all memory of himself.  However, Atreyu speaks on his behalf as a friend because he remembers who Bastian really is.  Bastian sheds all of the changes that he’s gained in Fantastica, becoming fully himself again and actually being happy with himself for the first time, able to truly love himself and love other people.  Bastian wants to bring some of the Water of Life to his father.

There is some consternation when the white snake of the Auryn realizes that Bastian has left uncompleted stories in Fantastica.  It wants Bastian to stay in Fantastica and finish them all, but Bastian says he’ll never get to go home if he does that.  However, Atreyu and Falkor promise to complete all of the unfinished stories on Bastian’s behalf, and the snakes of Auryn allow Bastian to go home.

Bastian finds himself in the school attic once again.  He’s not sure how long he’s been there, but his clothes are still wet, like they were from the rain when he started reading.  Bastian remembers that he should return The Neverending Story to the bookshop, but he can’t find it.  It seems like the book has disappeared.  He decides all he can do is talk to the owner of the bookshop and explain the situation.  As he walks through the school, he can’t find anybody and worries that he’s completely alone in the world.  He’s forgotten that it’s Sunday, and there’s no classes on Sunday.  Since the school building is locked, he has to let himself out through a window and climb down some scaffolding, a fear that would have been terrible for him before his adventures in Fantastica.

Bastian goes home and sees his father, who is glad to see him.  His father hugs him.  He’s been worried about him and wants to know where he’s been.  Bastian learns that he’s only been missing for a day.  Bastian explains the whole entire story to his father, and his father listens in a way he hasn’t before and actually understands.  When his father holds him on his lap and cries, Bastian knows that his father has received the Water of Life.  His father says that things are going to be different between them from now on.  At this point, Bastian’s adventures might seem like the imaginings and dreams of an unhappy and neglected boy and his father’s changes as the realization that both he and Bastian experienced loss and that Bastian badly needs his love.  However, the story isn’t quite over yet.

The next day, Bastian feels compelled to visit Mr. Coreander and explain to him about the book.  When he does, Mr. Coreander questions him about which book he took.  Bastian tells him, but Mr. Coreander says that none of his books are missing.  He denies ever having had a book called The Neverending Story.  Bastian insists that he’s telling the truth, and Mr. Coreander says that he’d better tell him the whole story.  Bastian once again tells the whole story.  When he’s finished, Mr. Coreander says that Bastian isn’t a thief because the book he took wasn’t from his shop.  He says that the book is from Fantastica and it has now moved on to another reader.  Mr. Coreander admits that he knows about Fantastica, and the book that Bastian read is only one door into it.  Mr. Coreander didn’t read that one, but he has read others, and he also gave the Childlike Empress a name.  He says that maybe Bastian will find other books that will return him to Fantastica.  When Bastian says that he was told that he could only meet Moon Child once, Mr. Coreander reveals a secret that only humans know: humans can see the Childlike Empress again if they give her a different name.  People can only see her once under each name she has, but humans can name and rename her again and again.  Mr. Coreander appreciates that he can discuss Fantastica with Bastian because there aren’t many people who have experienced what they’ve experienced, and Mr. Coreander thinks that Bastian will guide others to Fantastica and all of them will also bring back the Water of Life.

Posted on by TracyC

The Phantom Tollbooth

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, 1961.

Milo is a boy who never really knows what he wants or what to do with himself.  He is always bored because he doesn’t really know the purpose or point of doing anything.  Nothing he learns in school interests him because he can’t see what he could ever do with the knowledge.  He never bothers to read the books he has, play with his toys, or learn to use his tools because he just doesn’t have the imagination to appreciate them or what he could do with them.

One day, when Milo gets home from school, he finds an unexpected package.  It’s not his birthday or Christmas, but the package is definitely intended for him because it has his name on it: “For Milo, who has plenty of time.”  There is a list of items contained in the package: 1 tollbooth (which must be assembled, according to the directions), 3 precautionary signs (“to be used in a precautionary fashion”), some coins for the tollbooth, a map (with no familiar places on it), and a driver’s rule book (which must be obeyed).  Interestingly, it promises that if Milo is not satisfied with his tollbooth experience, his time will be refunded.  Since Milo doesn’t think he has anything else to do anyway, he decides that he might as well unwrap the tollbooth and set it up. 

Although Milo thinks that the map is purely fictional and that the tollbooth is just a playset, he decides that he might as well select a destination on it for his trip through the tollbooth.  He closes his eyes, puts a finger on the map, and selects a place called “Dictionopolis.” He gets in the toy car, puts a coin in the tollbooth, and goes through it.

To his surprise, Milo suddenly finds himself driving down a real highway, no longer in his own apartment.  He sees a sign pointing the way to a place called Expectations, and he stops to ask a man about it.  At first, he thinks he’s talking to a weather man, but the man corrects him, saying that he’s really the “Whether man.”  Part of his job is to hurry people along, even if they have no expectations.  Nothing the Whether Man says to Milo makes sense to him, so he decides that he’d better just get going.

As Milo drives down the highway, he gets bored and starts daydreaming.  As his mind wanders, the scenery gets duller and grayer, the car slows down, and eventually, the car stops and won’t move further.  Milo looks around and wonders where he is.  It turns out that he’s in the Doldrums, the home of the Lethargarians.  They tell him that thinking isn’t allowed there.  Milo says that’s a dumb rule because everybody thinks.  The Lethargarians say that they never think and Milo must not have thought either because, if he had, he wouldn’t be there.  People usually get to the Doldrums because they’re not thinking, and once they’re there, nobody is allowed to think.  They refer Milo to the rule book that came with the tollbooth.  Milo looks in the rule book and sees that is a rule.  There are also limits on laughing and smiling in the Doldrums.  Milo asks the Lethargarians what they do if they can’t think or laugh.  They say that they can do anything as long as they’re also doing nothing.  Mainly, they do things like daydreaming, napping, loafing, loitering, and wasting time.  They say it gives them a full schedule and allows them to get nothing done, which they consider an important accomplishment.  Milo asks them if that’s what everybody here does, and they say that the one person who doesn’t is the Watch Dog, who tries to make sure that nobody wastes time.

At that point, the Watch Dog shows up.  The Watch Dog looks like a dog, but his body is an alarm clock.  The Watch Dog asks Milo what he’s doing, and is alarmed when Milo says that he’s “killing time.”  It’s bad enough when people waste time, but killing it is horrible!  (The book is full of these kinds of puns. It’s just getting started.)  Milo explains how he got stuck in the Doldrums while he was on his way to Dictionopolis and asks the Watch Dog for help.  The Watch Dog explains that if he got there by not thinking, he can also get out by thinking and asks to come along because he likes car rides.  Milo agrees, and the two of them get in the car.  Milo thinks as hard as he can (which the book notes isn’t easy for Milo because he’s not used to thinking and doesn’t do it too often).  Gradually, as Milo thinks of various things, the car begins to move.  The faster Milo thinks, the faster the car goes.  Milo learns that it’s possible to accomplish a lot with just a little thought.

The Watch Dog’s name is Tock because his older brother is named Tick. However, their names are a mistake because his older brother only makes a tock sound, and Tock only makes a tick sound.  It’s a source of pain and disappointment.  Tock tells Milo about the origin of time and why Watch Dogs find it important to make sure that people use time well.  He says that time is the most valuable possession because it always keeps moving.

When they arrive at Dictionopolis, the gatekeeper won’t let them in immediately because Milo doesn’t have a reason for being there.  Nobody gets let in without a reason.  Fortunately, the gatekeeper always keeps a few spare reasons lying around, and he decides to let Milo have one.  The one he selects is “WHY NOT?”, which the gatekeeper considers a good, all-purpose reason for doing anything.  (I don’t know. I’ve heard that one followed up by an angry “I’ll tell you why not!” before.)

As readers have probably guessed, Dictionopolis is all about words. When Milo enters the city, he finds himself in the marketplace, which is called the “Word Market.”  The ruler of Dictionopolis is Azaz the Unabridged, and when Milo is welcomed to the city by the members of the king’s cabinet, they do so in multiple ways, using synonyms.  Milo asks them why they don’t just pick one word and stick with it, but they’re not interested in that.  They say that it’s not their business to make sense and that one word is as good as another, so why not use them all?  (That isn’t true, but the story tells you why not later.)  They go on to tell Milo that letters grow on trees here, and people come from all over to buy all the words they need in the Word Market in town.  Part of the cabinet’s duty is to make sure that all of the words being sold are real words and have real meanings because people would have no use for nonsense words that don’t mean anything and that nobody will understand.  The cabinet doesn’t seem to care about whether or not the words are being used in a way that makes sense as long as they’re real words. (If you’re familiar with business speak or buzzwords, you’ve probably noticed that much of it works on a similar principle.)  Putting the words into a context that makes sense isn’t their job.  (Later, you meet the person who had that job.)  However, the cabinet does advise Milo to be careful when choosing his words and to say only what he means to say.  They excuse themselves to get ready for the banquet and say that they’ll see Milo there later, although Milo doesn’t know what banquet they’re talking about.

Milo and Tock explore the Word Market.  Milo is fascinated by the variety of words available.  He doesn’t know what they all mean, but he thinks that if he can buy some, he can learn how to use them.  He chooses three words he doesn’t know: quagmire, flabbergast, and upholstery. (I’m surprised he didn’t know the last one because, surely, he has upholstered furniture in his apartment.)  Unfortunately, Milo quickly realizes that he has only one coin with him, and he’ll need that coin to get back through the tollbooth.  Eventually, he finds a stall selling individual letters for people who like to make their own words.  The stall owner gives them some free samples to taste. They taste good to Milo, and the stall owner tells them that sets of letters come with instructions.  Milo doesn’t think he’s very good at making words, but the Spelling Bee, a giant bee, begins showing him how to spell words.  However, the Humbug, a grumpy bug, tries to tell Milo not to bother learning.  The Spelling Bee tells Milo not to listen to the Humbug because he just tells tall stories and doesn’t actually know anything, not even how to spell his own name.

The Spelling Bee and the Humbug start fighting and knock over all the word stalls around them. There is a big mess, all the words get scrambled, and it takes some time before everyone sorts everything out.  By that time, the Spelling Bee is gone, and when the policeman comes, the Humbug blames everything on Milo and Tock.  At first, it seems like Milo will get off lightly because the policeman (who is also the judge) gives him the shortest “sentence” he can think of (“I am”).  Unfortunately, he’s also the jailer and takes Milo and Tock to prison for 6 million years.

In the prison, Milo and Tock meet the Which.  At first, Milo thinks that she’s a “witch”, but she says many people make that mistake.  The Which is King Azaz’s great-aunt, and her job used to be to make sure that people correctly chose which words to use and didn’t use more words than necessary. (A problem that Milo noticed in the market.)  The Which explains that she was thrown into prison because she got too carried away with her job and became too miserly with words. Word economy is good (and something I struggle with), but rather than promoting brevity, the Which started promoting silence instead,. It got so bad that people eventually stopped buying words and the market was failing, so the king had to put a stop to it.  The Which says that she understands now where she went wrong, and Milo asks her if there’s anything that he can do to help her.  The Which says that the only thing that would help her would be the return of Rhyme and Reason.  When Milo asks who they are, she tells him the story of the founding of the Kingdom of Wisdom.

Years ago, the King of Wisdom had two sons, and he was proud of both, but one of them had an obsession with words, and the other had an obsession with numbers.  The king didn’t realize how bad their conflict was growing, and it got worse over time. One day, the king found a pair of abandoned infant twins.  The twins were both girls, and the king had always wanted daughters as well as sons, so he adopted them and named them Rhyme and Reason.  Everyone loved Rhyme and Reason, and they had a talent for resolving problems and disputes. When the king died, he left his kingdom to both of his sons and left instructions for them both to look after Rhyme and Reason. The word-obsessed son, Azaz, established a capital city of his own, Dictionopolis, and the number-obsessed son, the Mathemagician, established the city of Digitopolis.  Rhyme and Reason remained in the city of Wisdom and acted as advisers to the brothers, mediating their disputes.  This system worked until the brothers got into their worst fight over whether words or numbers are most important.  They took this dispute to Rhyme and Reason, who said that both are of equal importance. This satisfied most people, but both brothers were angry because they had wanted the girls to make a definite choice between them. In their last joint act, they banished Rhyme and Reason to the Castle in the Air. Since then, there has been continued fighting between the two brothers and their respective cities, the city of Wisdom has been neglected, and there’s been no Rhyme or Reason to any of it. (Ha, ha.)

Milo says that maybe they could rescue Rhyme and Reason from the Castle in the Air. The Which says that would be difficult because there’s only one stairway to the castle, and it’s guarded by demons. Milo remembers that there is also the matter of them being stuck in prison for 6 million years. The Which says that being in prison isn’t really a problem. Although the policeman/judge/jailer likes putting people in prison, he doesn’t care much about keeping them there, so Milo and Tock can leave when they like, and he probably won’t notice. (Sounds like he’s not very good at the “jailer” part of his job.)  The Which points out a button on the wall, Milo presses it, and a door opens.

When they step outside, the king’s cabinet members come to take him to the banquet that they mentioned earlier. They have Milo and Tock step into their wagon and tell them to be quiet because “it goes without saying.” (Ha, ha.) They take Milo and Tock to a palace shaped like a book, where they meet King Azaz and join the banquet.

The banquet is a pun-filled meal where everyone has to literally eat their words and have half-baked ideas for dessert.  (Half-baked ideas look good, but you shouldn’t have too many because you can get sick of them. Tock says so.)  Nothing makes sense, and even the king realizes it, which gives Milo the opportunity to suggest bringing back Rhyme and Reason.  The king isn’t sure that’s possible, and the Humbug, of course, volunteers Milo and Tock for the job.  The joke turns out to be on him because the king volunteers the Humbug to assist Milo.  Reaching Rhyme and Reason will be a perilous journey, and possibly the most difficult part will be getting the Mathemagician to agree to let them do it.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is also a movie version of this book (mostly animated but part live action) with songs. You can see a trailer for it on YouTube.

My Reaction

The Phantom Tollbooth is a fantasy story, but like many fantasy stories, it’s also a morality story.  It’s a little like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which aims to correct children’s bad habits.  Milo’s boredom problems are due to his lack of thought for the things he could do and imagination to figure out how to make use of what he has.  His adventures after he goes through the Phantom Tollbooth help him to see things differently and to learn to use his mind creatively.

However, I wouldn’t say that the story is too preachy.  A couple of parts started to feel a little like a lecture, but it’s set in a fantasy land that feels a little like Alice in Wonderland.  There’s a healthy dose of nonsense that keeps things interesting and fun.  The book is peppered with puns and peopled by a fascinating variety of characters.  There’s the boy who can see through everyone and everything, who teaches Milo to look at things from an adult perspective and helps him to realize the benefit of keeping his feet on the ground (both of those are also puns). There’s the man who is the world’s shortest giant, the world’s tallest midget, the world’s thinnest fat man, and the world’s fattest thin man all at the same time.  Basically, he’s just an ordinary guy who’s noticed that people think of him in different ways when they compare him with themselves.

I was first introduced to this story when I was in elementary school, as many people were.  Our teacher read it to us and showed us the cartoon version.  Parts of songs from that version still get stuck in my head, almost 30 years later.  (“Don’t Say There’s Nothing To Do the Doldrums …”) The part of the story that stuck with me the longest was the Dodecahedron, a shape with twelve sides. If you’ve seen the twelve-sided dice used for Dungeons and Dragons and similar role-playing games, those are dodecahedrons. In the book, the Dodecahedron is talking character as well as a shape, but I remember it because our teacher gave us paper cut-outs to make our own dodecahedrons. I made two of them, and I might still have one somewhere.

Posted on by TracyC

Two Are Better Than One

Two Are Better Than One by Carol Ryrie Brink, 1968.

This is a gentle coming-of-age story about two thirteen-year-old girls in Idaho during the early 1900s, but it’s told in a interesting format, as the reminiscences of one of the girls as an old woman and focusing on a story that the girls were writing together as teenagers. It’s like a story about a story within a story.

One Christmas, elderly Chrystal Banks receives a special present from her old friend, Cordelia Crump. The package contains two miniature dolls (she calls them “pocket dolls”) that Chrystal gave to Cordelia 60 years before. At first, Chrystal doesn’t remember giving her friend Cordy” these dolls but admits that her memory is starting to fail her. As she studies the little china dolls and their exquisite details, she begins to remember them and when she gave them to her friend. The dolls’ names are Lester and Lynette, and Chyrstal remembers how Cordy used to say that the little dolls were magical because any day she carried them seemed to become special and exciting. Even when Chrystal and Cordy grew older, supposedly too old for dolls, they still continued to love and believe in the magic of their special pocket dolls.

Before young Chrystal Reese (as she was known before her marriage) gave the dolls to Cordy, they were a Christmas present to Chrystal from her Uncle Dick. That was the Christmas when the girls were in seventh grade and were early thirteen years old. Uncle Dick had acquired a number of interesting presents for Chrystal on his trip to Europe. He doted on his niece because she had no parents or siblings, living only with her grandmother and Aunt Eugenia and their dog, Rowdy. All of the presents are wonderful, but the little dolls are something special. As she unwraps them, they are hidden within a small box inside another box inside of another box (not unlike the story itself). Chrystal loves the elegant, detailed, jointed dolls immediately and names them Lester and Lynette because they just seem like the right names for the dolls.

Immediately, she goes to see if the little dolls will work well in the dollhouse that she’s made out of orange crates. She has spent considerable time and most of her allowance money putting paint and wallpaper into the little house and making furniture for it. She made all of the dollhouse furniture to fit two small dolls that she already has, Elsie and Eileen. However, Elsie and Eileen are four inches tall, and Lester and Lynette are only about two-and-a-half inches tall, so they won’t work in the house. At first, Chrystal is unsure what to do with the tiny dolls. She loves them, but she’s going to have to figure out where to put them and how to play with them if they won’t fit into the doll house. Then, she gets the idea to give the little dolls to her best friend, Cordy. It’s a sacrifice to part with such a lovely present so soon after getting it, but she wasn’t satisfied that the little bottle of perfume she was going to give Cordy was really a good present. Besides, the girls are so close that they already share everything with each other, and as they like to say “Two are better than one.” Giving the dolls to Cordy won’t be like giving them so much as sharing them with someone who can help to make them even more fun.

Cordelia Lark (her maiden name) grew up in a well-off family with mostly boys. Her father was president of the local bank and president of the school board and a civic leader in other ways, and Cordy had four brothers and no sisters. Cordy and Chrystal are kind of like the sisters neither of them ever had. They like to call each other “Tween”, which is their special pronunciation of “Twin.” They justify being twins because their birthdays are only two weeks apart, so they’re almost exactly the same age.

On the way to Cordy’s house to give her the special Christmas present, Chrystal passes by the courthouse. When she and Cordy pass the courthouse, they can see the barred windows of the jail, and they make up stories to spook each other about how one of the prisoners might escape. On this particular day, Chrystal sees one of the prisoners gripping the bars of his window and looking out. He’s the first prisoner Chrystal has ever actually seen. She’s a little afraid of him, and when he starts talking to her, she doesn’t know what to say at first. The man first asks her what she’s staring at, and then he wishes her a Merry Christmas, even though he’s not having one. Not knowing what else to do, Chrystal murmurs “Merry Christmas” back and hurries on.

When Chrystal gets to Cordy’s house, the two girls exchange presents. It turns out that each of them almost got the other some perfume, but each of them changed their mind at the last minute and decided on something better. Cordy’s present to Chrys (as she sometimes calls her) is a book, which makes Chrystal happy because she loves books and didn’t get any for Christmas this year. But, it’s not just any book. This is Chrystal’s first grown-up novel instead of a children’s book. (They mention the Oz books, the Little Peppers, and the Little Colonel series as books they’ve read.) It makes Chrys feel grown-up. It’s a romantic story about a Southern girl during the Civil War who falls in love with a Northern soldier and eventually marries him. Chrys says that Cordy shouldn’t have told her the ending before she’s read it, but she’s still thrilled at having her first grown-up book.

Chrys worries that, since Cordy gave her a grown-up present, she’ll think that the little dolls are babyish, but Cordy loves Lester and Lynette immediately. She says nobody gave her a doll this year, and she felt disappointed because she loves dolls, and it just didn’t seem like Christmas without one. Chrys explains that these are pocket dolls, and they’re meant to be carried around in pockets, so they can go everywhere with the owner. Cordy says that they’re so tiny and perfect that they must be magic, and she decides to keep the names that Chrys gave them, Lester and Lynette. Cordy thinks that the little dolls are perfect to take along on adventures.

When Chrys tells Cordy about the prisoner, the two of them are nervous, although they don’t really think he can escape. Chrys asks Cordy to walk her home, but after they pass the courthouse, Cordy realizes that she’d have to walk past the courthouse alone on her way home. So, Chrys and Cordy turn around and walk the other way again, but then, they realize that they still have the same problem. No matter which way they go, they have to pass the courthouse, and no matter who walks who home, one of them will have to go alone at least partway. After they go back and forth a couple of times, they pause in front of the courthouse, and Cordy has an idea. She gives Chrys the Lester doll, keeping the Lynette doll for herself. That way, each of them will have someone to keep them company, and it will be like they aren’t alone. It gives each of them enough courage to go the rest of the way home, and it’s the beginning of their adventures with the dolls.

Chrys is inspired by her first grown-up book, and she thinks that maybe she’d like to write novels when she grows up. When the girls are in school, they like to write notes and funny poems with each other when they’re supposed to be studying, and Chrys suggests to Cordy that they start writing a novel together. Cordy agrees, and they decide to take turns writing chapters. They decide that the story will be about Lester and Lynette, and Chrystal writes the first chapter. Chrystal calls the story “The Romantical Perils of Lester and Lynette.”

However, the girls get in trouble for goofing off and not paying attention in class. Their strict teacher, Miss Hickenlooper, decides that the two girls can’t sit together anymore, and she confiscates Lester and Lynette and locks them in her desk. The girls are devastated. If the teacher wanted them to move desks, that was disappointing but justified, but she had no right to just take the dolls. The girls think that they’ll have to wait until the end of term to get them back, but they continue writing the story about the dolls. Chrystal had been going to write the first chapter about an elopement, but because the dolls are now imprisoned in the teacher’s desk, she decides to write it as a prison escape instead.

In the new version of the first chapter of the story, Lester and Lynette are brother and sister, and they are imprisoned in a castle overlooking the Rhine river in Germany (part of the the girls’ geography lesson in school) by their evil guardian, Baron von Hickenlooper. Lynette is rescued/kidnapped by a Viking pirate named Oskar, who carries her away from her brother, who still remains in the castle.

From this point on, the events in Chrys and Cordy’s lives alternate with new chapters of their tandem story about Lester and Lynette. Pieces of the girls’ lives work their way into the story. When the girls are ready to trade turns writing the story, they give each other what they’ve written so far and say “Muggins!” (The word comes from playing games like Dominoes and Cribbage where, if one player spots that another has missed a score or failed to count something properly, they can call “Muggins!” and add the overlooked points to their own score. I think what they’re implying is that this story is a game where one person picks up whatever the other one has left unfinished.) The girls also continue adding verses to an unflattering poem that they started writing about their teacher.

By accident, the girls loose track of the mean poem about their teacher, and Miss Hickenlooper finds it. At first, the girls are terrified that Miss Hickenlooper is going to be furious with them and do something horrible in punishment, but to their surprise, she starts crying. Miss Hickenlooper end up having a heart-to-heart talk about the girls’ experiences in Miss Hickenlooper’s class, what Miss Hickenlooper hoped for when she started teaching, and why she took Lester and Lynette from them. Miss Hickenlooper had wanted to be a teacher for a long time and was looking forward to it, but she had been away from it for a long time because she had to take care of her mother during a lengthy illness. Since she started teaching again, she can tell that her students haven’t been happy with her, but after reading the poem, she realizes that it’s worse than she thought. Even strict teachers can be respected by their students as long as they’ve taught their principles well and the students are learning valuable lessons. Miss Hickenlooper feels like she’s failed as a teacher because she hasn’t managed to connect with her students at all, and she’s making them miserable. The girls come to the surprising realization that their teacher really does care about her students and what they think of her.

The talk between the girls and Miss Hickenlooper was a little uncomfortable because the girls realize that they’ve done an injustice to Miss Hickenlooper by writing the mean poem about her, but I actually liked this part of the story because it’s the kind of honest communication that I often find missing in stories. Rather than anyone blustering or dodging or trying to save face, the girls and their teacher honestly discuss what happened and how they feel, and everyone involved learns something from the experience. The girls appreciate having this “human” communication with their teacher, and it earns their respect, more than any angry tirade or show of strength on their teacher’s part ever would have. It’s this very kind of open honesty and humanity with real feeling behind it that’s been missing from the class so far, and it’s what has prevented Miss Hickenlooper from really connecting with her students.

The girls apologize to Miss Hickenlooper about the poem, and Miss Hickenlooper admits the justice of some of their complaints. Miss Hickenlooper admits that maybe she went a little far in making Cordy turn out her pockets and taking her dolls from her for an extended period of time. Getting into someone’s pockets and taking personal possessions is a kind of invasion of privacy, and Miss Hickenlooper says that she only did it because the girls weren’t paying attention in class, which is true. In return, Chrys and Cordy acknowledge that they only wrote the poem to blow off steam because they were angry, but they also went too far, and they really should have considered their teacher’s feelings. The girls promise not to write any more poems like that, and Miss Hickenlooper gives Lester and Lynette back to them. Miss Hickenlooper says Cordy can keep the dolls in her pocket if she wants as long as the girls pay attention in class from now on. To further apologize, the girls make cards for their teacher and give her the two bottles of perfume that they almost gave each other for Christmas (“Two are better than one.”), and they start going out of their way to be nicer to her.

The girls’ talks with Miss Hickenlooper through the rest of the school year give her feedback that helps her to improve as a teacher. Later, when the girls are watching a lightning artist (someone who paints pictures very fast, not the more modern definition of someone who works in animation) at work and happen to see Miss Hickenlooper in the store as well, they point out that one of the artist’s pictures reminds them of the Rhine that they studied in class. Miss Hickenlooper doesn’t think much of the quality of the painting, but she admits that it does look like the Rhine and that another painting the artist did reminds her of Switzerland when she was there. The girls are amazed that Miss Hickenlooper has been to Europe because, other than Chrys’s Uncle Dick, they don’t know anyone who has. They ask her why she never talked about it in their geography lessons because that would have made them much more exciting, hearing about other countries from the perspective of someone who was actually there. Miss Hickenlooper is surprised. She says that she was only focused on teaching the lessons that she was assigned to teach and just never thought about including anything personal because she didn’t think her students would be interested in her personal stories. Again, it’s that personal element that Miss Hickenlooper needs if she wants to connect with her students on a personal level.

As the story continues, the girls also start to consider their attitudes about boys and men and future husbands. So far, most of their knowledge of boys has come from the boys at school and Sunday school and Cordy’s brothers, all pretty immature and rowdy. But, the girls are growing up, and so are some of the boys. New young men also come into the girls’ lives.

A friend of Chrystal’s grandmother asks her if she would be willing to rent a room to her 19-year-old son, who is looking for a place to stay as he takes his first teaching job at the local college. (That sounds young for a college teacher. In modern times, a nineteen-year-old would be a college student himself. Remember, this is the early 1900s, and education in the United States was very different then. Back then, teachers didn’t need to have the advanced degrees that they do now, and Mr. Banks later explains that he skipped grades when he was younger to get through school faster.) Chrystal’s grandmother agrees, although Chrystal isn’t anxious to have a teacher living in her house after her problems with her own teacher at school. Chrys also isn’t sure what to expect from a man living in the house because there’s never been a man in this house before. Cordy’s brothers are pretty rowdy. However, their new lodger, Mr. Banks, turns out to be quiet, polite, and very nice. (His last name is an indication that he’s going to be Chrystal’s future husband. There’s six years’ difference in their ages, but as times goes on, and Chrystal gets older, that’s not going to seem like as much of a gap.) He is the first person to ever address Chrystal as “Miss Reese”, which makes her feel grown-up.

Cordy’s family also has a boarder, Mr. Crump, who is attending the local college (obviously, Cordy’s future husband, based on her future last name). Mr. Crump is working his way through college by selling pots and pans, and Cordy goes with him to help carry things, bringing along Chrys because “Two are better than one.” The girls end up giving him some advice on his sales patter that helps him make more sales.

Meanwhile, the girls’ Sunday school class, which calls itself the Dorcas Club, decides to host a masquerade party with the boys’ class (who have dubbed themselves the Armored Knights) as their guests. Chrys and Cordy think of the boys as immature and uncouth and roll their eyes at the older girls who are boy-crazy. Then, because the party is on Presidents’ Day, all of the girls in the group want to go dressed as Martha Washington, and there’s a big argument about it. Originally, Chrys and Cordy wanted to be Martha Washington, too, but since that’s what all the others want, they decide that they want to do something completely original. Inspired again by the dolls, they decide to go dressed as dolls. However, because they don’t want to be like the prissy girls trying to be pretty and impress the boys, they decide not to go as elegant dolls but as old rag dolls in patched clothing.

The girls do win prizes for both the funniest and most original costumes at the party because they’re the only girls who don’t show up as some version of Martha Washington. However, the triumph turns against them because the girls who are in charge of the main entertainment for the evening have decided to turn it into the girls’ very first dance party with the boys, something that Cordy and Chrys weren’t expecting. Rag doll costumes are good for fun and games, but not so much for serious dancing and the possibility of budding romance. While all of the boys are wearing various fanciful costumes themselves, like pirates and clowns and cannibals, it turns out that they’re only interested in the girls who dressed in pretty clothes as Martha Washington, and none of them want to dance with the rag dolls. Chrys and Cordy were proud of themselves for being more original than the other girls, but it seems that the boys prefer “pretty” to “original.” At the end of the evening, none of the boys even want to walk Chrys and Cordy home. Chrys and Cordy feel embarrassed because their efforts to be “original” seem to have strayed a little into the outlandish at a time when the other girls and boys are starting to seriously get interested in each other.

Fortunately, their families guessed that something of the sort might happen and asked the young men boarding with them to go to the house hosting the party and walk the girls home if they had no one else to walk with them. Mr. Crump confirms to the girls that boys would prefer to walk with girls who made an effort to look pretty instead of girls who look like rag dolls. Mr. Crump says that there will be other parties, and next time maybe they’ll go as something more elegant, like Martha Washington, but the girls aren’t too thrilled about doing this type of party again. Mr. Banks takes a different view and says that he actually thought that the rag doll costumes were rather clever and that it was really better for the girls to be different instead of trying to be like every other girl in order to not stand out. “Sometimes it may hurt, but I think it’s better to be original.” Mr. Banks the college teacher is more mature than Mr. Crump the college student, and I think he has the right idea. Looks and clothing styles change, and people have different priorities when they get older, but original thinking and an interesting personality are hard to replace and never go out style. When Chrystal says that she doesn’t even know how to dance, Mr. Banks offers to teach her, so she can be more confident at future parties.

Having the boarders walk them home actually turns out to be an unexpected victory for Chrys and Cordy because, while the other girls were making fun of them for not having any of the boys dance with them or walk them home, Chrys and Cordy ended up being escorted by young men. Getting boys is all well and good for young girls, but being escorted by young men makes Chrys and Cordy look like young women, putting them on a higher level than mere girls. Chrys and Cordy don’t see it that way at first because Mr. Crump and Mr. Banks are just their families’ boarders and friends and treat them like younger sisters (at this point in their lives, anyway), but the other girls notice that the young men are more mature than the Sunday school boys, and it causes them to look at Chrys and Cordy with a little more respect for having their attention. In some respects, Chrys and Cordy might seem less mature than the girls who are excited about wearing makeup and getting boys because they’re into outlandish costumes and dolls and “romantical” stories, but in other respects, they may actually be a little more mature than the other girls for being confident in their individuality and the new awareness they’re acquiring of other people’s feelings. In the end, girls want to marry men, not little boys, anyway.

Through the spring, the girls have other adventures and continue writing their story with their dolls. Along the way, there are other signs that the girls are growing up. They notice that this is the first year when they’re more interested in getting new Easter bonnets than they are in their Easter eggs. Cordy’s family is heavily involved in the social life of the local college because two of their boys are students there, and Cordy even gets to go to some of the campus parties. She helps to serve punch there and sometimes gets to dance. She eventually arranges for Chrys to come with her to help with serving and have her first dance, too. Miss Hickenlooper also discusses the girls’ future with them, suggesting that they take exams to see if they can skip the eighth grade and go straight into high school because she thinks they’re smart enough to pass. The girls are uncertain if they want to go on to high school so quickly. They know they’re growing up, but they haven’t thought about high school yet (and this is a time period when not everyone even attended high school). There is also the horrible thought that one of them might pass the test while the other didn’t, and they might end up going to different schools and being in different grades. Miss Hickenlooper says that they don’t necessarily have to go on to high school yet, if they feel that they’re not ready, even if they’re offered the opportunity, but she urges them to take the tests anyway to see if they have the option. It makes the girls start questioning their future lives, what they really want, and where their education will take them.

At one point, Cordy’s brothers find their unfinished novel in Cordy’s room, steal it, and use it to make fun of the girls. The story isn’t really very well written because Chrys and Cordy are only thirteen years old. As readers will have noticed, there are spelling mistakes all through the story, and the girls also get mixed up about geography because they’re just focused on making the story exciting instead of really thinking about the setting. After their characters’ adventures on the Rhine, the girls send them floating in a boat to a tropical island with coconuts and palm trees because they don’t think about just how far away the tropics actually are. (Being shipwrecked on an island is also a common trope of vintage and antique children’s books, so they’ve probably read this type of story themselves. Just scroll through my lists of children’s books from the 1900s and earlier, and you’ll see what I mean.) Although Mr. Crump was laughing at the girls, too, he rescues the story from Cordy’s brothers and gives it back to them when he sees that the joke is going too far. However, the girls are somewhat dispirited, thinking that their story might be deeply flawed. At first, they don’t know if they really want to continue writing it, but in their desperation, they turn to the one person they know will be honest with them about what they’ve written and can not only tell them whether or not the story can be fixed but how to do it – their teacher, Miss Hickenlooper.

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

Themes, Spoilers, and My Reaction

The story is one of those gentle, calm stories with a few funny episodes and some genuinely touching moments. Fans of slice-of-life historical books like the Betsy-Tacy series will like this book. It is a coming-of-age story for Chrys and Cordy, as they begin to develop new attitudes and come to a deeper understanding of themselves and other people and start thinking about the future. However, the girls’ adventures also teach other people around them some lessons.

One of the themes of the book involves how people let their personalities show. Although the girls were originally thought silly for their outlandish rag doll costumes at the party, they were more bold and creative than the girls who just wanted to look like everyone else. Even though their creativity wasn’t fully appreciated at first, it ends up working in their favor in the long run.

One of the biggest developments in the story is the relationship between the girls and their teacher, and the keys to that relationship are learning how to see other people as people, how to be open about showing their personal sides, and how to appreciate people with different personalities. The girls begin as thoughtless students, and their teacher is a strict disciplinarian with little patience for their goofing off, which is why the girls see her as their antagonist. However, the girls’ eventually realize that, through their mean and complaining poem, they’ve hurt their teacher’s feelings as much as she’s hurt theirs, maybe more. It leads them to see her in a new light, as a person and just just their jailer (the role of her alter ego in the girls’ story). The honest talks between the girls and their teacher not only helps the girls to become more thoughtful and considerate of others’ feelings but also show their teacher that the key to improving her teaching and developing a better relationship with her students is to be a little more personal with her students. She gradually learns that letting her students see her as a person with interesting life experiences earns their respect more than just acting like an unfeeling drill sergeant enforcing discipline. Inspired by the girls’ interest in her travels when she was younger, Miss Hickenlooper starts bringing postcards and souvenirs from her travels to class to show during geography lessons. The students are fascinated by her souvenirs and stories and start thinking of her as an a kind of intrepid explorer or sophisticated world traveler instead of a dull woman who focuses on dry memorization and gets mad at them for daydreaming in class. As she tries new ways of approaching her lessons and adding in personal experiences, Miss Hickenlooper takes on a whole new role in the children’s lives and sparks all of their imaginations. All of the students, not just Chrys and Cordy, start behaving better because they become genuinely interested in what Miss Hickenlooper has to say and show them. They don’t want to make her angry because she’ll stop telling the interesting stories if they don’t get their work done. Just because she’s gotten more interesting and personal doesn’t mean she’s gotten soft. Don’t be afraid to be interesting and different!

The girls never actually show Miss Hickenlooper their story because they’re a little embarrassed by what they’ve gotten wrong, but they ask her questions about some of the things that they put in their story to find out what’s right. They do end up finishing the story and giving Lester and Lynette a grand wedding, but they also acknowledge that they are getting too old and busy with other things to continue playing with dolls, even Lester and Lynette. They plan to put Lester and Lynette away for now as souvenirs of their childhoods. Later, they do tell Miss Hickenlooper about their novel, and while she hasn’t read it, she has the feeling that she knows what it’s like from knowing the girls and their writing. (The girls wrote about scenes from their novel when asked to describe places they know for their high school entrance exams.) She tells them that she appreciates their imaginations but that they should remember to focus on the real world around them and gaining real experiences to write about in the future.

There are also themes that focus on what growing up and maturity mean. Because the story focuses on one school semester in the girls’ lives, there are many questions that the book leaves unresolved about what happened in the girls’ later lives, but it seems that their lives turned out well, and they look back on their experiences with Lester and Lynette as a turning point when they really started growing up. Toward the end of the story, the girls begin appreciating some of the possibilities of life and the wider world that they never considered before. Through it all, there is also the girls’ constant friendship. At the very end, elderly Chrys writes a letter to elderly Cordy, thanking her for sending the dolls and reminding her of this special time in their lives.

The author of this book, Carol Ryrie Brink, was also a child around the time that Chrys and Cordy were children. There is a picture of her as a child above her biography on the dust jacket of the book. She is also the author of Caddie Woodlawn, which is better known than this book.

I love books that contain details about life in the past, and there are a lot of fun details included in this story. I’ve mentioned some above, but that’s just scratching the surface. At one point, Chrystal says that the only paper she has that’s good for painting pictures is the pieced of paper that separate pieces of Shredded Wheat in the box. The lined paper from the notebooks she uses for school isn’t as good. When she’s out of those pieces of paper, she has to eat more Shredded Wheat to get more. I don’t remember seeing any similar kind of paper in shredded wheat boxes in my lifetime, so this must be something that existed before modern packaging.

At the college dances, the girls have dance cards for the young men to write their names and initials in to secure spots for dances. There are also occasional mentions of food, and Chrys mentions having floating island pudding for dessert, which I’d never heard of before. It’s a kind of meringue that floats on a base of vanilla custard.

Posted on by TracyC

A Child’s Garden of Verses

A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by T. Lewis and Sara Gutierrez, 1989.

This is a reprinting of the classic collection of children’s poems by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1885 as Penny Whistles. What makes this edition of the book different from other printings is the illustrations, which are an unusual combination of watercolors and embroidered borders. Mary Pope Osborne, author of the Magic Tree House series wrote an introduction to the book about the life of Robert Louis Stevenson and his youth in Scotland in the 1850s, which inspired his poems for children. (See my list of Books from 1850s for the types of books children were reading during this time period, but remember that they also would have read books that were published in previous decades.)

The poems have gentle themes from the lives and fantasies of children, like games of pretend, bedtimes, and the little things that children notice and that adults often take for granted, like shadows and the beauty of stars. Some of them have things that are now anachronistic, like lamplighters, but they’re still imaginative and enjoyable for all ages.

I’ve always liked Robert Louis Stevenson’s children’s poems, and this book has my favorites! My personal favorites are:

To Any Reader – Robert Louis Stevenson speaks to children reading these poems about the child he used to be and how the poems are like a window on his childhood, although his own youth is long gone.
Escape at Bedtime – About a child who sneaks out of bed at night to look at the stars.
The Swing – I mentioned this one before because it’s included in another collection of poems, and I’ve often thought of it when I’ve been on swings.
Picture Books in Winter – A child enjoys picture books indoors when it’s cold outside.
The Land of Storybooks – About the adventures that children who love books enjoy in their imaginations.

However, my mother’s favorite children’s poem is Bed in Summer because it reminds her of her own childhood and having to go to bed while the sun was still shining in summer and other children in the neighborhood were still playing outside. (I didn’t have this experience when I was growing up because I never lived in a place that had daylight savings time, which changes the clocks by one hour, providing an extra hour of daylight before sunset. Arizona is very hot, so there’s a benefit for doing things after the sun has set, and few people have any interest in pushing back time to maximize the scorchingly hot daylight hours. My childhood memories include going to parks with my parents after the sun set and being put to bed after we got home.)

There are many copies of this book available in various printings online both at Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg because the text of the original book is now public domain. I didn’t see this particular printing with these illustrations available online, but if you just want to read the poems, there are plenty of other copies of the book to choose from!

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

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 Ankle Grabber

The Ankle Grabber by Rose Impey, 1989.

This book is part of the Creepies series, where children have fun imagining monsters. The stories are about the power of imagination and the fun of being a little scared. Sometimes, even though the children know that they made up the monsters themselves, they also get scared of their creations. Books in this series can be good for talking to children about how their imaginations can run away with them and scare them, but I’d use caution when introducing them to very young children because they can make nervous children more nervous by feeding their imaginations. These books would probably be best for ages seven and up. Fortunately, even when the kids’ imaginations run away with them, the stories always end in reality, and the hero of this story is … Dad!

Every night, a little girl has her mother check her room for monsters, but no matter how well her mother searches for them, the girl is still terrified of the monster who lives in an invisible swamp under her bed. She calls this monster the Ankle Grabber because she believes that if she isn’t careful, the monster will reach out from under the bed and pull her down into the swamp by her ankles.

But, as is inevitable when you’ve got a monster under your bed, the girl realizes that she has to go to the bathroom. Getting in and out of bed without being caught by the Ankle Grabber is a tricky proposition. The girl tries to get into and out of bed by jumping so that she can avoid the monster.

When she misses her jump back into bed and lands on the floor, her father comes in to see what’s wrong. Her father has scared off monsters for the little girl before, so he sticks his head under the bed to scare off the Ankle Grabber, too.

Nothing is so scary that Dad can’t make it better!

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