The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrations by Jules Feiffer – bjornsnipe Book Review

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.

Young Milo finds everything absolutely boring; tv is boring, school is boring, life is boring up until the day he arrives home from school to discover a tollbooth has appeared in his room, complete with a map of places to see and a car to go to them. Seeing as there’s nothing good on t.v. and he has nothing better to do, Milo drives through it and is transported to another world.

The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between.

Once there, he discovers a world that is far more strange and wonderous then he could have imagined; a world where you can literally eat your words, where you can reach the Island of Conclusions by jumping to it, and there are literal watchdogs. The one Milo runs into is called Tock, and he’s very angry at Milo for killing time. Milo, Tock, and the Humbug who they pick up along the way, must go to the Castle in the Air to rescue the Princesses of Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason, the adopted sisters of the brother rulers of the two Kingdoms of Wisdom; King Azaz the Unabridged of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis.

I have loved this book since I was a child; in fact, I’ve gone through at least four copies of it because I keep re-reading it until the pages fall out and I have to buy a new one. Norton Juster just had a way with words that very few people can come close to. Jumping to the Island of Conclusions, Officer Shrift who is short, Faintly Macabre, the Not-so-Wicked Which (not to be confused with Witch); so many of the characters and situations are multi-layered. Reading The Phantom Tollbooth is like watching a Looney Tunes cartoon (back before Warner Bros. pulled them all); you can enjoy reading it as a child on one level, and then if you read it again when you’re older, you start to pick up all the nuances you maybe missed the first time around.

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.

One of my absolute favorite scenes in the book takes place in Digitopolis, when Milo manages to outwit both Azaz and the Mathemagician into giving their blessings to actually rescuing the Princesses. It goes to show how clever children can be when they put their minds to it, and how stubborn some adults are when they know what they know and will not back down no matter the cost.

Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.

You get the feeling that Milo is so well written here because Norton Juster honestly liked children; unlike Roald Dahl books, where Dahl hated children but liked writing about them. Which is sad to say about a father of five, but there you go.

Adding to the enjoyment are Jules Feiffer’s illustrations; he says a lot with what look like slightly more fleshed out doodlings.

(I will give a shout out though to the animations of the movie at this point; in the book, Tock looks like a large Yellow Lab/Saint Bernard mix, which I love. Seeing as the movie is animated by Chuck Jones, Tock looks like a grownup version of Max from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, which is adorable).

Honestly, you have to read this book if you haven’t already; it’s not that long, and I guarantee it will put a smile on your face. You should be thankful that this is just an online review; I annoyed more relations, friends, and classmates growing up because every birthday party I was invited to I’d gift a copy of this book as well as their main gift. Also there are probably a lot of booksellers that are unhappy because every book drive for children I come across this is the book I will donate.

My reaction to all of them?

If you want sense, you’ll have to make it yourself.

But just because you can never reach it, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth looking for.

“Yes, indeed,” they repeated together; “but if we’d told you then, you might not have gone—and, as you’ve discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”