Travel to a Fantastical and Wordy World through The Phantom Tollbooth


        Who doesn’t like an adventure? One filled with strange creatures with crazy ideas of how the world works, who challenge and push a book’s hero to do and be more than he or she thought possible?

Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth delivers just such an adventure with Milo, a little boy who starts the book with intense ennui about life. Enter a tollbooth that mysteriously appears at his home. Once on his way through the booth via a toy electric car, Milo’s city apartment turns into a wickedly thrilling world with locations like Expectations, Dictionopolis, and Digitopolis. In each location, Juster entices the reader with word play; when Milo is imprisoned, he is told his cell-mate will be a witch, but it turns out to be a Which who has historically been in charge of which words should be used in the book’s Kingdom of Wisdom.

As Milo moves forward, he finds a mission, to find two princesses, Rhyme and Reason, who were banished to the Castle in the Air after they declared that letters and numbers had equal import. He also finds friendship and camaraderie with the locals he finds along the way: the watchdog Tock (so named because he is part-dog, part-watch), and Humbug.

The Phantom Tollbooth demands the reader forego reality and give in to its fantastical world with its own logic. It also grounds us in things familiar, such as friendship and the power it has to make challenges doable and a lot more fun. Published in 1961, the book does show its age by lack of a strong female character. I was dying for a Hermione Granger to appear, but she never did.

By book’s end, Milo has been called upon to think about words and numbers in new ways, which turns him from a bored little boy into one excited to learn and think differently. Hopefully it does the same for a reader.

         (Many thanks to Caitlin Swofford for recommending The Phantom Tollbooth. I’d missed it as a child but am glad I didn’t miss it as an adult.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Five Books to Escape into while Social Distancing

Maybe one day soon a headline will read, “Out of Netflix Content, More People Turn to Books for Relief.” If you’re already ready for some literary escapism, check out these five books I read and loved in 2019. Hopefully they help you in this difficult time: The Storm King , Brendan Duffy. This book has many things that would make me not choose it as a Top Five: a straight male hero; not many strong female leads; privileged men acting out their privilege. Alas, it sucked me in with a short, strong opening chapter that set the tone and the mystery for the rest of the book. Duffy’s writing is a bit dramatic at times, but that’s also what kept the pages quickly turning. You can check out my review here . The Soul of an Octopus , Sy Montgomery. Montgomery ’s beautiful work in The Soul of an Octopus gives us hope about the connectivity between living creatures. Introducing the reader to several octopuses she met at the New England Aqua...
Read more

Almost Too Much Covered in The Tradition

In his third book of poetry, The Tradition , Jericho Brown covers much ground: he grapples with myth, media, racism, his own mortality, and still manages to push past established forms of poetry. It’s impressive in scope, but the breadth can leave the reader forgetting the ground covered because there was too much of it. Brown conveys a disdain for the world around him that embraces and encourages racism and violence, but also exudes a confidence about his own abilities to navigate the terrain. This is a book from a grown, tired man, and is filled with the heartbreak and the fortitude he’s earned. He introduces, too, the “Duplex” form in his poetry, described by Jeannine Hall Gailey in her Barrelhouse review of The Tradition as “a sonnet-like series of couplets that include repetition.” The repetition accomplishes a layering of experiences and voices, making his experiences feel that much more echoed in the lives of others, as though he is not alone. These stories are from a...
Read more

A Chat with E. Christopher Clark, author of the Stains of Time series

In the first book of his Stains of Time series, E.Christopher Clark pulls in magical realism, a hearty dose of nineties’ nostalgia, and family drama to tell Veronica’s story. Pregnant at sixteen, Veronica marries the baby’s father to appease a father who might never be happy with her, but really won’t be happy with her if she follows her heart and dates women as she wants to. Clark kindly answered About a Book’s questions about The Piano of Death , the series as it stands now, and his plans for its future. About a Book : How/when did you conceive of The Piano of Death ? Clark : The book that people can read today really started to come together in September 2011. I met with my friend, the actor/director Crystal Lisbon…to plan a benefit for the arts organization she was starting. Another friend of Crystal’s, the musician Mary Casiello [joined us for that meeting]. We were trying to put together an evening of theater and music, and I was tasked with writing the scrip...
Read more