Review: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had never heard of this book as a kid. I and my sister were exposed to more British books than American ones. (Well, I didn't even know Dr. Seuss until the World Wide Web came into our lives and by then I was a teenager!). As kids, we owned tonnes of Enid Blyton books (around the age when we should have read this book), and as we grew older more American books (Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys) found their way into our lives. Then it was back to Harry Potter and Tolkien! I came across this book when someone I follow on Goodreads rated this generously with a note that this book should be interesting no matter how old the reader was. Well, it is never too late to catch up with good literature, is it? (Ah I just jumped to "Conclusions"!)

The Phantom Tollbooth is about a kid named Milo, who is completely disinterested in his life. Enter a magical 'DIY' tollbooth that seems to have appeared from nowhere (*cough* Sweden?) with precise instructions on how to use it. A drive through the tollbooth (on the road to Expectations), takes Milo into the kingdom of Wisdom , but not before briefly being lost in Doldrums (!). The kingdom is a place in turmoil because the two nutty brothers who rule each half (Dictionopolis and Digitopolis) have banished rhyme and reason from it. As in literally! Rhyme and Reason, the princesses who tried to knock sense into their warring brothers' brains,were unsuccessful and booted out of the kingdom.

Milo ends up with the unlikeliest of companions, a watchdog and a humbug (again, quite literally so!)and travels to bring back Rhyme and Reason. Along the way he meets more characters and places, whose names are such witty puns on the characteristics they embody, that you can't help but chuckle.

While I went into this book knowing well that it was a children's book, I was somewhat surprised by the amount of word-play and mathematical reasoning depicted in here. I am not sure every kid who read this book or had this book read to him, would have fully appreciated the meaning behind it, but I guess some of them have gone back to re-read it as adults. One star off, only because I kept getting lost in 'Doldrums' myself at some points in an effort to keep up with the puns and navigate the typos in my ebook. Some parts of the story were just plain silly to me, but they would have entertained a kid perhaps. I think at a point I was trying to find puns where there weren't any, and as someone who dislikes mathematics, I did not enjoy being in Digitopolis :-)

I'll leave you with my favorite lines from the book by the SoundKeeper;
..."And it's the same for all sounds. If you think about it, you'll soon know what each one looks like. Take laughter for instance," she said, laughing brightly, and a thousand tiny brightly colored bubbles flew into the air and popped noiselessly. "Or speech," she continued. "Some of it is light and airy, some sharp and pointed, but most of it, I'm afraid, is just heavy and dull".

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