Review #27: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Title: Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth. Random House. 1961. Tr. $17.01. 255 pages. ISBN 978-0-394-81500-8
Genre: Fiction/Science Fiction/Adventure/Fantasy
Reading Level/Interest Level: 6.7/ Grades 5-8
Awards:
Series:
Similar Titles: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Yellow Submarine [Motion Picture] by The Beatles

Like most children his age nowadays, young Milo is bored. Constantly bored, constantly suffering, constantly disinterested with the world and watching the clock tick by slowly, until the day he receives a map and a magic tollbooth from a mysterious benefactor. The tollbooth transports him to “The Lands Beyond”, the land named Wisdom, where he must save Princess Rhyme and Princess Reason and restore the kingdom, saving it from discord and disharmony, phrases uttered often in the book, all over the controversial topic of which is better, letters or numbers. That is, of course, if he can escape dungeons, evil mathematicians, The Doldrums, The Mountains of Ignorance and the Senses Taker, with the help of a watch bellied dog and a downer of a companion, Humbug.

With turns of phrase, vocabulary words that will stretch the imagination, visual imagery that is literally comprised of the words on the page, and settings that seem to already exist in our minds, though we failed to name them, Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth is not only a fantastic adventure of a novel, but a book that shows a new inside joke every thirty seconds that children, and especially adults, that can appreciate the irony of names and places, like the “Senses Taker” and the infuriating “Spelling Bee”  will smirk and chuckle all the way through.

It is no small wonder that this book is often compared to Through the Looking Glass or Alice in Wonderland, as it has the same non-sensical, abstract, lunacy element that Carroll’s work does, with an intellectual element that, I think, surpasses even Carroll, who focused more on morals than smarts. It seems to me that Juster writes his novel from the perspective of a parent watching his own child struggle with the common “boredom” phase just as he did, and is giving him the tools to not only tell his own story out of nothing, but is teaching him how to look at his world in such a way, that it will always be interesting, even when there is nothing of interest to be had.

While I read this book at the age of 11 and understood it, I believe, due to the non-sequential delivery of events and the significant and advanced vocabulary, I would have enjoyed it much more at 13, even though we read it as a group. It is my recommendation that older tweens and advanced readers read this book as soon as they feel comfortable, and aren't afraid to carry a dictionary near them while reading.