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The Princess and Curdie

The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald, 1883.

This is the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, but it isn’t as well-known. Personally, I prefer The Princess and the Goblin, but it’s worth explaining what this book is like and how this two-book series ends.

When we last met Curdie, he was living in a cottage in the mountains and working in the mine with his father. At the beginning of this story, he is still there and still working in the mine. Most of the goblins who inhabited the mines were drowned at the end of the previous book. The beginning of the story briefly recounts the previous adventure and how the king offered Curdie a position in his guard after he helped to rescue the princess and fight the goblins. Curdie turned down the position to remain with his parents, and the king accepted his decision because he approved of the boy’s loyalty to his family. Since then, the king took Princess Irene away with him, and Curdie has missed her.

Since the old, castle-like manor house where the princess spent her earliest years flooded at the end of the story, Curdie has wondered what happened to the great-great-grandmother the princess always spoke of. Nobody ever saw her leave the house, but then again, nobody but the princess and her father ever saw her at all. Curdie’s mother says that she once saw a mysterious light, like the kind Princess Irene said that her great-great-grandmother had, but Curdie still thinks maybe the princess just dreamed that she had a great-great-grandmother, even though he once followed the magical string that the great-great-grandmother gave her.

As Curdie grows up, he believes in fewer things than he once did and focuses more on being a miner than on the little things he once noticed in the upper world. The book describes him as becoming mentally dull and more rigid and common in his thinking. Like other common and mentally-dull people, he is starting to follow the path of being so afraid of being fooled into believing something foolish that he is at risk of making a fool of himself because he is unable or unwilling to think about things deeply, consider possibilities, and believe things that he should:

“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in, so afraid of it that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his teeth. Curdie was not in a very good way then at that time.”

Curdie’s parents worry about this change in him and find themselves wistfully thinking about how he was when he was younger. Curdie no longer makes up the songs and verses he used to because it is no longer necessary to scare the goblins away. He seems to have lost much of his former creativity, imagination, and mental flexibility because he has not been exercising them, and with them, he has been losing his critical-thinking and analysis skills and his ability to look outward and see the big picture of life and other people.

One day, Curdie makes a bow and arrows, and he uses them to shoot a pigeon. As he watches it die, he is horrified at what he has done. He suddenly remembers what the princess said about her great-great-grandmother keeping pigeons, and he feels terrible that he has killed something so lovely. His remorse stirs his heart and brings back the memories and feelings of the boy he used to be. Then, the pigeon moves, and he realizes that it is still alive, and he sees the globe of light of the great-great-grandmother. Curdie hurriedly takes the injured pigeon to the old castle. The door is open, so he goes inside and follows the sound of a spinning wheel to find the princess’s great-great-grandmother, seeing her for the first time.

Curdie admits what he has done to the great-great-grandmother and gives her the bird. The two of them discuss right and wrong, and Curdie comes to realize that he has done a great many wrong things for some time because “I was doing the wrong of never wanting or trying to be better. And now I see that I have been letting things go as they would for a long time. Whatever came into my head I did, and whatever didn’t come into my head I didn’t do.” In other words, Curdie has fallen into the habit of being thoughtless, and this is the first time in a long time that he’s paused to think about things he’s been doing or could have been doing instead. He realizes that he has even been grumbling about his work and not adequately helping his parents, and even though he noticed that they’ve been seeming unhappy and he suspected it had to do with him, he never once asked them how they felt or why.

After they have this talk and Curdie realizes the real problems behind the things he’s done and is genuinely sorry for them, the lady tells him not to worry because the pigeon will recover now, and she will take care of it. She merely gives him the caution to “Do better, and grow better, and be better. And never kill anything without a good reason for it.” Curdie offers to destroy his bow and arrows, but the lady tells him not to because there are bad things that need to be killed and that the bow and arrows may be useful someday. She also tells him that there are people who tell stories about her and laugh about her, and she asks that Curdie not laugh with them or side with them.

Curdie goes home and tells his parents what happened. They believe him and say that he should do what the lady says. The next day, when the other miners are telling stories about the lady, saying that she’s an evil witch, Curdie has to fight to hold his tongue. When they press him for what he thinks, he only says that he thinks that, if they’re going to tell stories about her, they’d better be sure that they’re true because she wouldn’t like to be slandered. The others laugh at him for being afraid of her or for wanting to defend her.

The lady appears to Curdie and his father again later. She tells them that they have the blood of the royal family in their veins, and she hints that there is a special destiny in store for Curdie. Curdie tries to ask her some questions about who she really is and about her changing appearance, but all she says is that she has many names and can appear in many different forms, and even different people see her differently. She tells Curdie to come see her alone in her tower the next night.

When he sees her the next time, the lady asks if he is ready for a difficult trial. She says that it will hurt and that it will require trust and obedience, but it will be good for him. When Curdie tells her to command him, she tells him to put both of his hands into her fire. He does it quickly, trying not to think about it, and it does hurt at first. However, it stops hurting, and when he takes his hands out of the fire again, he discovers that they are softer than they were before. The roughness and callouses from his work in the mines are gone. The lady tells him that his hands have changed more than that. She says that he will now be able to feel when he touches the hand of a man who is actually a beast on the inside, but he will lose that gift if he uses it for a selfish purpose. To demonstrate the gift, the lady calls a strange creature called Lina to them, and when Curdie feels the creature’s paw, it feels like a child’s hand. Although the creature appears strange and menacing, it’s actually good and gentle on the inside.

The lady tells Curdie to tell his parents that he must go to the king’s court the next day. She has given his father an emerald that they can use to see if he is all right during his travels because its appearance will change if he isn’t. The lady also sends Lina with Curdie to help him on his journey. Curdie is a little uneasy about that because he can tell that Lina is one of the goblins’ creatures, but Lina is genuinely helpful to him, and he becomes fond of her.

When they finally reach the king’s city, Curdie meets the king’s baker. The baker stumbles on a stone sticking up out the street and curses the king for not maintaining that road. Curdie argues that the baker himself bears some responsibility for watching where he’s going, especially since he says that he’s tripped on that stone before and knows it’s there. However, Curdie has his pickaxe with him and sees an easy way of dealing with the problem. He breaks up the rock that’s sticking out of the road, but a piece of it flies out and breaks the barber’s window. The barber comes to complain about it, and he insists that Curdie pay him more than the window is actually worth. Curdie gives him what he thinks is a fair price, and he feels the animal paw in the barber’s hand, showing what kind of man the barber is and that Curdie’s gift is still working.

There are other cruel, hard-hearted, immoral, and brutish people in this city, and sadly, some of the nicer people tend to be on the receiving end of the malicious gossip of the others. Curdie and Lina are taken in by a woman who is rumored to be a witch simply because she prefers to live quietly and not gossip like the others. Of course, everyone immediately begins gossiping about Curdie and his strange animal companion. The local magistrate believes the slander of a couple of people whose dogs Curdie had to kill because they were trying to kill him and Lina. These people claim that the dogs were harmless and Curdie killed them for no reason. When the magistrate and his soldiers come to arrest Curdie, he says that he’ll surrender, but he refuses to restrain Lina so they can kill her. Lina chases off the crowd that’s gathered to watch, but then, she vanishes herself, and Curdie is arrested. Fortunately, Curdie manages to escape and reunite with Lina. Then, he and Lina find their way into the king’s cellar and kitchen. There, he finds that the king’s servants are drunk and passed out. His touch tells him that these people are beasts inside. Going further into the palace, he finds the king’s chamber, and there, he meets Princess Irene again.

Princess Irene recognizes Curdie again immediately. It’s been less than two years since they last saw each other. She was about eight years old then, so she can’t be more than ten years old now, but Princess Irene seems older than she should be because of everything that’s been happening in the king’s palace. Her father has been ill for a year and is not in his right mind. Princess Irene thinks that the entire kingdom is concerned for him because that’s what the lord chancellor has told her, but Curdie knows that isn’t true because he hasn’t heard a word about there being anything wrong with the king outside of the palace. Princess Irene says that the king has also asked for Curdie, and his staff claimed that they tried to send for him but couldn’t find him. Curdie knows that definitely isn’t true because, until he started his journey to the king’s palace, he had been living in the same cottage where he always lived, and no one from the palace tried to find him or sent him any message.

It’s obvious that there are wicked people in the palace. These people are responsible for the king’s current condition, and they’re trying to keep the public from finding out what’s been happening. With his gift of telling who is a beast on the inside, can Curdie help Princess Irene to find and deal with the conspirators and restore the king to his right mind?

The book is public domain now. It is available to read online through Project Gutenberg (multiple formats) and Internet Archive (multiple copies). You can also listen to a LibriVox audio reading online through YouTube or Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

As with the first book, royalty is used to represent people with the best morality in the story. Curdie and his family have royal blood because they are more wise and moral than other people around them. It feels a bit classist to think that royalty is supposed to be morally superior to everyone else just because they were born into a particular family. That certainly isn’t how these things work in real life. Just think of Prince Andrew. However, this type of comparison does fit with the fairy-tale setting of the story.

In spite of whatever royal blood he has, Curdie isn’t perfect. He was falling into bad habits until he realizes that he has done a terrible thing by shooting the pigeon, which causes him to seek out the great-great-grandmother Princess Irene told him about and to do some soul-searching about his behavior. During the time when Curdie is being thoughtless and falling into bad habits, he is portrayed as being too common, like the other men working in the mine. However, I would argue that the bad habits of the miners, like their wild, gossipy stories and rude joking and teasing, are not because they lack royal blood but because they lack thought. Curdie and his father say as much when they’re talking in the mine. The other miners are being thoughtless, and they’re simply not making any effort to be more thoughtful. More than any royal blood, Curdie proves himself worthy by his ability to be thoughtful about other people, and he gets that ability by wanting to improve himself and making the effort to do what it takes to improve.

A large part of this book comes off as a lecture about morality, but that’s not unusual for a Victorian era children’s book. The Princess and the Goblin had some of that, too, but this book has much more. That might be part of the reason why this book seems like it’s less well-known than the first book, but the ending of the book is also strange and kind of depressing.

As one might expect in a fairy-tale story of this kind, Princess Irene marries Curdie (not immediately, because they’re still children, but eventually), and the two of them are said to rule their kingdom wisely for many years. It seems like a happy ending because, thanks to Curdie’s ability to sense the true nature of people, they are able to surround themselves with the best people, and the city becomes less wicked under their rule. However, the story doesn’t end there. In the final paragraphs of the book, it says that Curdie and Irene had no children to inherit the crown. Without a blood heir to the kingdom, someone else was chosen to rule instead, and this person was wicked and greedy, so the royal city went back to being wicked. In fact, this new king was so greedy and stupid that he had his people mining continuously, right under the city itself, to bring him riches. They eventually completely undermined the entire city, so the city physically collapsed in on itself, destroying it completely and killing everyone there. I guess that’s meant to explain why this fairy tale kingdom no longer exists, but that’s quite an ending to this story! With this royal family apparently having some kind of magic about them, it seems incredible that their kingdom would have gone this way, but then again, maybe the author just didn’t want to write about them anymore.

Note to the wise: Wherever your source of wealth comes from, for the love of all that is good in the world, don’t mine your support beams! They serve a purpose and need to stay there for a reason.

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The Princess and the Goblin

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1872, 1920, 1986.

“But, Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?”
“Because every little girl is a princess.”
“You will make them vain if you tell them that.”
“Not if they understand what I mean.”

The Princess and the Goblin, Chapter 1: Why the Princess Has a Story About Her

This is an enchanting fairy tale-type story about a princess. One of the best parts comes at the beginning of the book, when the reader supposedly interrupts the author as he starts to tell the story, asking him why he likes to tell stories about princesses. The author explains that princess stories remind every little girl that she is a princess, that they are all the daughters of kings (apparently in the sense that any man can be the king of his family with all the dignity and wisdom that implies, and it reflects well on them when their daughters behave well, as if they were raised with the manners of royalty), even if they sometimes forget that and behave in very un-princesslike ways. He wants to remind them that they are all princesses and can behave with the grace and dignity of princesses, and he can also pamper them a little because, in the course of the story, he can give them every beautiful thing he wants all the little princesses of the world to have. There’s kind of a behavioral caution in that explanation, but also a sweet sentiment. Even if you’re just an ordinary girl, you can still act with royal dignity and grace, and through the story, you can vicariously enjoy all the riches and adventure that a fairy tale princess can have.

The princess in the story, Princess Irene, is about eight years old, being brought up in a castle or manor house in the countryside because her mother was not physically strong when she was born and is now dead. She is largely raised by her nurse and only sees her father, the king, occasionally. Her father spends his time traveling between his castles and manors, visiting various parts of his country to make sure that everything is in order. Princess Irene cannot go with him because she is still too young to travel that much.

There are caverns under and around the castle-like manor house where Princess Irene lives. There are mines in the area, and the caverns are inhabited by creatures like kobolds or goblins. The story says that there are legends that these creatures once lived above ground, but having some quarrel with requirements imposed on them by the king or human society, they retreated underground to live there in secret. From generations of living underground, they have become physically altered into deformed creatures, but they have also acquired arcane knowledge and delight in playing mischievous tricks. Because of fears of the goblins coming out at night, Princess Irene is kept safely indoors before the sun goes down and has never seen the night sky by the age of eight.

One rainy day, Princess Irene is sitting in her nursery, bored. She has many fabulous toys (so amazing that the author of the book declines to describe them and cautions the illustrator against attempting to draw them, so readers can imagine any fabulous toys they like), but Irene in not in any mood to be amused by anything. Princess Irene is restless and doesn’t even quite know what she wants. When her nurse leaves the room, Irene takes the opportunity to run off and explore parts of the castle she has never before explored. She runs up some stairs into a passageway full of doors. She continues running through the passageways with doors leading to rooms with nobody in them until she becomes lost and confused. The corridors are empty, and there is no sound but the rain. One of my favorite quotes from this book says, “It doesn’t follow that she was lost, because she had lost herself though.” Just because Princess Irene doesn’t know where she is or where she’s going doesn’t mean that she isn’t heading in the right direction, where she needs to be.

Frightened, Princess Irene tries to find her way back to the nursery. Eventually, she finds her way to a room where she hears a humming sound. When Irene enters the room, she finds a beautiful old lady with silver hair sitting at the spinning wheel. Irene isn’t sure how old the lady is because she seems almost ageless. The lady notices that she’s been crying and asks her why, and Irene explains that she is lost. The lady is kind to her, washing her face and hands, and she introduces herself as Irene, too. She says that she is the princess’s great-great-grandmother and that Princess Irene was named after her. Princess Irene wonders why she’s never seen her before, and the elderly Queen Irene says that no one else knows that she is here. She shows Princess Irene the pigeons she keeps and promises that Princess Irene will see her again. Then, she guides the little girl to the stairs back to the nursery.

When Princess Irene is back in her nursery, her nurse is relieved because she’s been looking for her. The princess explains that she was with her great-great grandmother, but her nurse doesn’t believe her. Princess Irene is offended that her nurse thinks she made up the whole story. The next day, Princess Irene tries to find the old lady’s room again, but she can’t. She almost starts to wonder if she did just dream about her.

After the rain is over, the princess and her nurse spend some time outside. They wander farther than they should, and the nurse realizes in a panic that they cannot get back to the castle before the sun sets. The nurse grabs the princess’s hand and begins running for home. She becomes even more panicked when the princess thinks she sees little men and hears a sound like laughing. In their haste and panic, they get lost. The princess doesn’t understand why her nurse is so panicked because no one is supposed to scare her by telling her about the goblins.

Fortunately, they meet up with Curdie, a young miner boy. It scares the nurse that Curdie is singing about goblins, but Curdie says that goblins can’t stand singing. Goblins don’t bother Curdie because he’s used to them and doesn’t let them frighten him. This is the first time Princess Irene learns about the goblins. When the nurse tells him who the princess is, Curdie says that they wouldn’t have gotten lost if they weren’t frightened and that it was a bad idea to say the princess’s name because the goblins might have heard and will recognize her if they see her again. Curdie guides them back to the castle before anyone realizes that they are missing. Irene likes Curdie and wants to give him a kiss for helping them, but the nurse stops her. Curdie tells her that there will be another time, and she can keep her promise of a kiss later.

Curdie can tell that the goblins are angry with him for interfering with their pursuit of the princess by their behavior toward him the next day. It doesn’t bother him much because he knows exactly how to deal with them. Goblins are intimidated by songs and rhymes, probably because they can’t make any themselves. Miners who are good at remembering songs and rhymes or making new ones for themselves don’t need to worry about the goblins, and Curdie has a talent for this sort of thing.

While Curdie is in the mine after the other miners have left, he overhears a goblin family talking, and he learns some useful things. First, he finds out that goblins’ feet are a vulnerable point on their body. Their heads are very hard, but their feet are very soft, and they have no toes. The only one who wears shoes is the goblin queen, and the goblins say that’s because the goblin king’s first wife wore shoes, and the second queen doesn’t want to seem inferior to the first. The goblin king’s first wife was a human woman, who died giving birth to their son. Second, the goblins are building new homes further away from where the miners have been mining. Third, the goblins are planning some kind of disaster against the miners. Curdie secretly follows the goblins to find out where the goblin palace is and learn more of their plans. At the goblin palace, he hears them discussing their plans. They don’t offer many new details, but it is clear that they are planning some sort of revenge against humans.

Princess Irene finds her way to her great-great-grandmother’s room again one night. This time, the old Queen Irene shows Princess Irene what she is spinning. She is spinning spiderwebs to make something for Princess Irene. She heals a wound on the princess’s hand and invites her to spend the night with her. When Princess Irene wakes up, she is back in the nursery, but she now believes that it wasn’t just a dream.

Later, the princess is frightened by a horrible goblin creature that enters her nursery through a window that the nurse left open when it was getting dark. Terrified, Princess Irene runs out of the castle into the darkness (somehow missing the extra guards that her father left at the castle for her protection). Fortunately, her great-great-grandmother sends her a magical lamp that guides her back to the castle. There, she gives the princess the present that she has finished making: a ball of finely-spun spider silk. She also gives Princess Irene a ring with a fire opal. She tells the princess that these things will guide her to safety any time that she is frightened.

The magical spider silk thread helps Princess Irene to find Curdie when he is captured by the goblins. Curdie has been trying to learn more about the goblins’ plans. Curdie discovers that the goblins are planning to kidnap Princess Irene as both a hostage and a bride for their half-human, half-goblin prince. Worse still, if their plot to abduct the princess doesn’t work, they plan to flood the mines and drown the miners!

This book is in the public domain. It’s available to read online through Project Gutenberg (multiple formats) and Internet Archive (multiple copies). You can also hear a LibriVox audio reading of this book online through YouTube and other audio recordings at Internet Archive. The story was made into an animated movie in 1991, and you can see it online through Internet Archive. There is only one sequel to this book, The Princess and Curdie. Personally, I think the original is better than the sequel.

My Reaction

This is a classic children’s fantasy story! The princess is sweet, the villains pose a real threat, and the story doesn’t shy away from the goblins’ evil. When they’re describing what to do with the princess when they get her, they talk about how they’re going to make her toes grow together so she’ll be like them. As princess stories go, this one isn’t as sparkly and pink as many modern princess books. Still, as the author notes in the beginning, this story allows all little girls to think of themselves as princesses and imagine themselves going through the adventure with Princess Irene.

As with many other Victorian era children’s stories, there are moral lessons in this one. The author periodically reminds readers about how princesses should behave with bravery and should keep their promises. There are also various other morals in the story, like the value of hard work and duty to others, learning to understand other people and give them the benefit of the doubt, and having the courage to admit mistakes and make them right. All of these values are described as being noble, and it’s implied that Curdie might have princely blood for exhibiting these values. The book uses royalty or the behavior of princesses and princes as a sort of metaphor for moral behavior.

Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother is never fully explained. At one point, Princess Irene brings Curdie to see her, but he can’t see her, even when the princess is sitting on her lap. However, the king himself goes to see her without the princess. The princess knows that’s where he’s going because he’s heading in that direction. He is aware that the old Queen Irene is there, but he doesn’t share that knowledge with anyone else. When Curdie tells his mother that the princess tried to show him her great-great-grandmother but nobody was there and he thought that she just made it all up, his mother tells him that there is something very odd about the royal family. She says that they’re not sinister, but there are rumors and implications that there is something magical about them or that they are not quite normal humans. At the end of the story, we never get a firm answer about what Queen Irene really is. When I first read this book, I thought that she might be a ghost because, as an ordinary human, she shouldn’t be alive anymore, and I figured that she only shows herself to members of her own family. However, that doesn’t fully explain her magic, and from what Curdie’s mother says, maybe she’s some kind of fairy or elf or maybe a powerful sorceress, who can either live forever or for a long period beyond the normal human lifespan.

One of the parts that I always liked best about this book is the illustrations. They’re charming and magical! These particular illustrations were made by Jessie Willcox Smith, a famous illustrator of children’s books in the early 20th century, in 1920.

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The Prince and the Golden Ax

The Prince and the Golden Ax by Deborah Nourse Lattimore, 1988.

This story is based around the ancient Minoan civilization and the destruction of the island of Thera. Thera was a real place, and it was actually destroyed, but the story itself is fiction, based upon the pieces of information that the Minoans left behind about their culture.

When the story begins, the city of Knossos on Crete is the home of the Goddess Diktynna. Princess Illyra and her brother, Akros, are on their way to Crete from Thera with their fleet of ships. Akros is eager to show off his skills at the games on this feast day, although Illyra cautions him to not show off too much and to remember to honor the goddess.

When they arrive at Crete, they are shown the goddess’s shrine with her statue holding the golden ax that is the source of her power. Akros is impressed by the golden ax and begins to think that if he had the ax, he could use it to bring glory to Thera. At the feast games, Akros shows off his ability to wrestle a bull. Full of pride for himself, he declares that he’s even better than the goddess because he did it without a golden ax. The goddess is angered by his comments and causes an earthquake.

The priestess says that Akros has challenged the goddess, and in order to make amends, Akros must find the golden-scaled fish of the Eastern Isle and obtain a bronze ax. If he fails to complete this task, the goddess’s golden ax will destroy Thera. Akros has no choice but to accept the challenge.

Illyria has the ability to use magic, and she helps her brother to complete the task successfully, but Akros can’t resist bragging about how easy it all was, angering the goddess again. This boast earns him a more difficult task, to capture a griffin and earn a silver ax.

Once again, Illyria helps Akros to succeed in his task, but when he is presented with the silver ax, Akros insists that it’s not good enough for him and that he wants the golden ax. The priestess says that only a godlike hunter can have that ax, and if he tries to get it, his homeland will be destroyed. Still, Akros insists that he can prove that he’s good enough by catching a creature that no one, man or god, has ever caught before.

What Akros has in mind is catching the blue monkeys on the island of Thera. This time, Illyria refuses to help him because the blue monkeys are sacred. At first, Akros thinks that he’s managed to capture the blue monkeys without her help, but they have abilities that he never expected. As promised, when Akros fails to accomplish his boast, the island of Thera is destroyed, and Illyria and Akros only narrowly escape.

The book ends with the discovery of the remains of the palace of Knossos centuries later, when the image of the goddess and a small ax are discovered.

My Reaction

I knew at the beginning of the story that there couldn’t be a happy ending because I already knew what happened to the real island of Thera, now called Santorini. The island was largely destroyed by a volcanic eruption during the Minoan period, a cataclysm that may have sparked the legend of the sunken island of Atlantis. However, this story does not mention Atlantis, instead using the statue of a goddess found in the remains of the palace of Knossos as inspiration. In spite of the ending, I wouldn’t call this a sad story. The book doesn’t dwell on the aftermath of the destruction of Thera, and we don’t actually see much of the civilization of Thera, so there isn’t much for us to miss when it’s destroyed. The colorful pictures throughout the book are beautiful and actually feel rather cheery.

Posted on by TracyC

The 13 Clocks

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber, 1950.

An evil Duke lives with his niece, Princess Saralinda, in a castle with 13 clocks that do not work. The Duke is a cold-hearted man, so cold that his hands are always cold, and he has frozen all of the clocks. Time itself seems frozen in the cold castle. The Duke comes to believe that he has actually “murdered” time, that it will never again be “Now” in the castle. The Duke is afraid of “Now.” “Now” has urgency and consequences, and he hopes that by stopping time, he will never have to confront “Now.”

One of the Duke’s fears is of his niece’s suitors. Princess Saralinda is lovely and as warm as the Duke is cold, so the Duke does not want to let her go. He needs her warmth as relief from his own coldness. Every time a potential suitor attempts to call on Princess Saralinda and ask for her hand, the Duke thinks up some impossible task for the suitor to accomplish with a sentence of death for failing to accomplish the impossible so Princess Saralinda will never be married.

Then, a prince comes to town disguised as a minstrel named Xingu, which is dangerous because using a name that starts with ‘X’ is one of the things that the Duke sometimes kills people for doing. The prince is a youngest son, and as youngest sons often do in fairy tales, he has gone into the world to seek his fortune, adventure, and the lady of his dreams. At the town’s inn, the minstrel prince hears stories about Princess Saralinda, her suitors, and the Duke’s impossible challenges. In spite of the gruesome consequences for failing to complete the impossible tasks, the prince finds himself contemplating how he might be able to gain entrance to the castle and try his hand at defeating the Duke and winning the princess.

The minstrel prince begins making up a joking song about the Duke, and the people in town are nervous because the Duke kills people for any form of impertinence. One of the Duke’s spies, known as Whisper, witnesses the song and runs off to tell the Duke about it. Then, the prince is approached by a strange little man who calls himself the Golux and who offers to help him, although he freely admits that he makes up stories and often forgets what’s made up and what’s real. The prince doubts how helpful he can be, but the Golux suggests a story he can tell the Duke when the Duke considers killing him and feeding him to his geese, that Princess Saralinda can only be married two days after his death. The Duke would do almost anything to prevent Princess Saralinda’s marriage, so he wouldn’t kill him if his death might be the omen that causes her marriage to happen.

Soon, the Duke’s guards come to arrest the minstrel prince and take him to the dungeon. When he is brought before the Duke, the minstrel prince tells him what the Golux told him to say. The Duke isn’t sure whether he’s telling the truth or not, but since he’s not sure if he can kill him outright, he decides to set one of his impossible tasks for the minstrel to complete. The minstrel says that he can’t do an impossible task because he’s not a prince (as far as the Duke knows), but the Duke says that they’ll make him one just so he can do it.

As the guards escort the minstrel prince back to the dungeon, he sees Princess Saralinda, and she wishes him well, which is all that she can say in her uncle’s presence because she’s under a spell. The minstrel prince falls in love with her, and he realizes that his love is returned when she later manages to give him a rose.

In the dungeon, the minstrel prince encounters the Golux again and asks him how he got in and if there’s a way out, but the Golux is evasive, just telling another one of his stories about his mother being a witch and his father a wizard. However, the Golux has a useful suggestion for managing the Duke’s next impossible task: control what the task is through reverse psychology. He doesn’t use those exact words, but he tells the minstrel prince to beg the Duke to set him any task he likes but not to send him out in search of a thousand jewels. The Duke, being evil, will automatically set him the one task he begs not to be given. The minstrel prince says that he still can’t give the Duke a thousand jewels because he doesn’t have any jewels. The Golux points out that he’s no ordinary minstrel. He is actually Prince Zorn of Zorna, and his father will surely supply the jewels he needs. That’s all very well, but the prince isn’t sure if the Duke will give him the time he needs to reach his father and return.

Sure enough, the Duke sets the prince the task of getting a thousand jewels, but the matter is complicated because it turns out that he’s aware of who the prince really is. Knowing that it would take Prince Zorn 99 days to get the required jewels from his father and return, the Duke gives him only 99 hours to do it, and he further requires that all of the 13 clocks in the castle strike five o’clock (they are frozen at 10 minutes before five o’clock) when he returns with the thousand jewels.

The stakes of the task are high for both the Prince and the Duke because, as a guard explains to Prince Zorn, the Todal, which is a kind of blob monster in the service of the devil, waits to gobble up the Duke if the Duke fails to be sufficiently evil. If Prince Zorn passes whatever test the Duke sets for him, rescues the princess, and escapes, the Todal will surely put an end to the Duke.

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

This isn’t a princess book for young children because it has some dark content in it. The Duke is cruel to animals and has even killed children. The cruelty and killing isn’t described in detail, but the story is better for older elementary school children or middle school level. I’d say about 9 or 10 years old and older.

Through the course of the story, it’s revealed that Princess Saralinda isn’t actually the Duke’s niece. He later confesses that he actually abducted her from a castle as an infant, and even he isn’t completely sure of her true identity. Even as a child, she had that magical, glowing warmth that the Duke craves. He’s been raising her with the idea of marrying her himself when she’s old enough. He’s been unable to marry her up to this point because her former nurse was a witch and cast a spell that prevents him from marrying her until she’s 21 years old, and that time is approaching soon.

Part of the fun of this book is that it draws on many elements from fairy tales, like the woman who can cry jewels, which somewhat resembles the fairy tale about the kind girl whose words produce jewels and flowers when she speaks. The solutions to many of the problems in the story are also riddles. For example, if nothing makes a person laugh or cry, then literally nothing is what you have to provide. In the case of how to get the clocks moving again, Princess Saralinda has been the key all along. The clocks aren’t dead, merely frozen, and her warmth can get them moving again.

Of course, it all ends happily. Princess Saralinda’s true identity is established by the end of the story, and Prince Zorn is able to marry her. The Duke is thwarted and eaten by the Todal.

Posted on by TracyC

A Meeting of Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction and Spoilers:

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

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

Why We Wrote A Meeting of Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by TracyC

Out of Their Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by TracyC

More Minds

More Minds by Carol Matas and Perry Nodelman, 1996.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction and Spoilers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by TracyC

Of Two Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Reaction

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

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

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

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

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

Spoiler:

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

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

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

The Case of the Dragon in Distress

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

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

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

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

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoiler:

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

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

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Princess Tales

Princess Tales edited by Nora Kramer, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, 1971.

This is a collection of princess stories by various authors, including retellings of some classic fairy tales, some or all of which were printed in other locations before being included in this collection.  Although I have encountered some of these stories before this collection, I liked the illustrations in this book because I like Barbara Cooney’s work.

Stories in the Book:

The Practical Princess by Jay Williams (1969) – I know this story from the story collection that is named after it, but it did appear in other printings before either of these.  Princess Bedelia was given the gift of common sense as a baby, and she uses her practicality to rid her kingdom of a dragon and save herself from marriage to an evil sorcerer.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Virginia Haviland (1959) – A retelling of the classic fairy tale.  A French kingdom with twelve beautiful princesses is mystified by how the princesses’ shoes are always worn through every morning even though the door to their room is locked every night when they go to bed.  What are the princesses doing every night that ruins their shoes, and how are they doing it?  Michel, a young cowherd who has recently taken a gardening job at the castle and who has fallen in love with the youngest of the twelve princesses, discovers the answer.  When her sisters want to enchant Michel, as they have others who have discovered their secret to keep them from telling, Princess Lina needs to decide if she loves Michel as much as he loves her.

The Princess and the Vagabone by Ruth Sawyer (1942) – A beautiful but bad-tempered Irish princess learns a lesson in kindness when her father gets fed up with the way she treats her suitors.  All of her life, the princess has dealt out criticism and insults to everyone, when she sees a suitor with whom she can find no fault, she doesn’t know what to do (never having practiced kindness or spoken nicely to anyone) and gets angry, hitting him and crying as she runs from the room.  Her father, disgusted with her impossible behavior, tells her that he’s had enough, and since she has rejected all the royal suitors, he will force her to marry the next vagabone (vagabond) who comes begging at the castle.  As the wife of a vagabond, the princess learns to face hardships she has never experienced before, sees for the first time how much kindness from another person can really mean, and notes positive points about others for the first time, enjoying the ragged vagabone’s song.  But, there is still one more surprise when the vagabone turns out to be the perfect suitor the princess thought that she had rejected.

Melisande by E. Nesbit – A king and queen want to avoid the usual messes and curses that often result from holding a christening party for a new princess and forgetting to invite one of the fairies, so they decide that, for their daughter Melisande, they will simply hold an informal christening with no party.  However, all of the fairies get mad about this and come to give curses to the princess.  Fortunately, the king points out logically that, according to tradition, only one forgotten fairy can offer a bad curse to a princess after being left out of a christening party.  Fairies are held to certain rules and can vanish for breaking them, so since the first fairy already cursed the princess with baldness, the others simply agree to count themselves are party guests and leave.  Princess Melisande spends her childhood being bald, but the king offers her a fairy wish that he had been saving for something special so that she can wish for hair.  However, Melisande foolishly wishes for her hair to grow exceedingly fast and even faster when cut.  It’s far too much hair for her, even though people try to help her find uses for it, like weaving it into clothes and stuffing pillows with it.  As usual in these cases, the king offers Melisande’s hand in marriage to the prince who can help her to solve her problem.  At first, Prince Florizel thinks he’s found the solution when, instead of cutting the princess’s hair from her, he cuts her from her hair.  However, that has the unintended side effect of making the princess grow suddenly tall!  What will Prince Florizel do to get the princess and her hair to balance?  (At one point, this story references Alice in Wonderland.)

The Handkerchief by Robert Gilstrap and Irene Estabrook (1958) – At first, Zakia is not happy when her father, the Grand Vizier of Morocco accepts the sultan’s offer to marry her on her behalf. She doesn’t think that it’s fair for him to order her to marry anyone, and she doesn’t love the sultan. In response, she imposes a requirement on the marriage, that the sultan must learn a trade in case he loses his throne and has to earn a living. To the vizier’s surprise, the sultan thinks that sounds like a clever request, and the sultan learns the art of weaving. He enjoys it, and he makes a beautiful handkerchief for Zakia as a wedding present. Zakia appreciates the gift and marries him. The sultan’s ability as a weaver later saves him when he is in a desperate situation.

The Blackbird’s Song by Barbara Leonie Picard (1964) – An artist paints an unflattering picture of the king and is thrown into prison. However, the princess’s pet blackbird sings to him of the princess’s beauty and kindness, and he is able to paint a marvelous portrait of her without having seen her himself. When the princess falls in love with the artist, her blackbird and its friends help them to make their escape from her father.

Ricky-of-the-Tuft by Polly Curren (1963) – A prince is born ugly, and his mother is worried, but a fairy gives him the gift of wit and intelligence, with the ability to give that gift to someone he loves. In another kingdom, a queen has two daughters. The eldest is beautiful and the youngest is plain. However, a fairy says that the plain girl will be bright and intelligent, and people who talk to her will forget what she looks like. The beautiful girl is less fortunate because she is not intelligent. People will enjoy looking at her, but they will quickly tire of her because she does not speak intelligently and has nothing to say. To compensate the beautiful girl, the fairy says that she will be able to make the person she loves beautiful as well. When the ugly prince, Rick-of-the-Tuft, meets the beautiful princess and falls in love with her, the two of them are able to use their gifts to help each other. The story is based on a Perrault fairy tale.

The Son of the Baker of Barra by Sorche Nic Leodhas (1968) – The baker’s son, Ian Beg, is a nice boy, and sometimes a little too nice. When his father sends him to take a cake to the princess, he is stopped by old women who ask him for a taste of the cake, and he cannot refuse them. However, it turns out to be a fortunate thing. The old women are actually fairy folk, and not only do they handsomely compensate him for the cake that they eat, but they also help him when the princess falls in love with him and the king tries to get rid of him by sending him off to find a castle of his own. The king doesn’t expect that Ian Beg will be able to find a castle and supply the kind of lifestyle that a princess needs, but he doesn’t know that Ian Beg has help.