The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

This book was given to my son by my friend Steve (my age), who said it was one of the best books he had ever read. Now I consider that friend a pretty clever fellow, but even with a buildup like that, it still took me a few years to pull this book off the shelf and read it. But now that I have, I'm glad I have, although it hasn't been a life changer. 

The book involves a young fellow named Milo, who has a bad case of ennui. He is bored by practically everything he does in his normal life. But then he gets a mysterious package with the phantom tollbooth in it; he puts it together before using his toy car to drive through it. That's when his adventures start. On the order of Tolkein's map of Middle Earth, this book contains a map with the strange new places Milo discovers. It includes a city called Wisdom, a place where words are very important called Dictionopolis, and a place where numbers are king, called Digitopolis. The latter two places are run by feuding brothers, who can 
agree on nothing except that they disagree with everything the other says. 

Milo meets a new friend, a watchdog built from a clock, named T ock (even 
though he goes "tick"), a bee who literally spells, and Humbug, a very 
disagreeable fellow who nonetheless joins Milo and the dog on an impossible 
mission to rescue the lovely princesses Rhyme and Reason, who have been 
exiled to the Castle in the Air. During their journey, they meet other allegorical characters like the Mathemagician, Chroma the Great, the Soundkeeper and the Senses Taker, all of whom have very specific and humorous jobs in the story. I can see now why it was compared by early critics to Bunyan's "Pilgrim's 
Progress"! 

It was published as a children's book in the 1960s, and is filled with what Maurice Sendak calls "linguistic acrobatics". He considers "The Phantom Tollbooth" to be pure gold, so that recommendation from the famous children's author is certainly better and stronger than this one. I'm not big on allegory, so when I started reading the book, I didn't like it as much as Sendak, my friend or my son did. 

However, the cleverness and the puns did end up charming me. It was a quick 
and easy read - I probably finished it in about 3 hours, and got severai good 
chuckles and some interesting life lessons out of it. 

Still, I wish that my library had a copy of the libretto and musical adaptation of this book, so the drama teacher could put it on at my kid's school. I am curious how it would go. but omehow I have the feeling it would have all the charm of John Adams modern opera, "Doctor Atomic." 

Submitted by Gerti