The Phantom Tollbooth

The Phantom Tollbooth

Hardcover - USA - 1st edition.

Author Norton Juster Published 1961-08-12 Type Fiction Genre Adventure, Fantasy Themes Adventure, Childhood, School Age Group Children

The Phantom Tollbooth is children's fantasy adventure novel written by Norton Juster and published on 1961-08-12. Much of the story uses wordplay including figures of speech, idioms, metaphors, similes, and the like. The book was quite successful and has been adapted into a film, a play, and even an opera.

In the story, a boy named Milo is bored and disinterested in education, but one day he receives a magic car and tollbooth that transports him to the once prosperous, but now troubled, Kingdom of Wisdom in the Lands of Beyond where he learns to appreciate the importance of learning.

Personal

Own?	No.
Read?	Audiobook read by Rainn Wilson.
Finished	2023-05-01.

When I was in my 20s, I was talking to a woman about how I liked clever children's books and she suggested this title. A little later, I found it in a book store and started reading the first couple pages, but I found it quite dull, so I didn't buy it. I would occasionally see it on a list of best books, so it remained on my radar for many years later. In my 40s, I found an audiobook of it, and decided to read it that way. As I was reading the section where Milo had to go to Dictionopolis and Digitopolis and made me think of a short story I read in my middle school English textbook, and, when I finally got to the part in the book with some quotes I had still in my memories, I realized that my textbook must have contained excerpts from The Phantom Tollbooth. This reminded me just how amazing the human brain is, that, after about 30 years of not thinking about it, I still had the memories of the book in my head! In the end, I enjoyed the book, but it didn't become one of my favorites.

Review

Overall:

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The book has a fun whimsical story. It reminds me of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
• There is a lot of word play all throughout the book, several occurrences of which were quite clever.

Bad

• It doesn't feel like anything ever came out of the tollbooth. It was more just a reason for Milo to have a car to drive around the Lands Beyond.
• Not all of the wordplay is clever, in fact, a lot of it is rather bland, and some of it is even tedious.
• The deus ex machina of Tock saving the group by jumping out of the castle in the clouds because sometimes "time flies" was silly.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

Covers

• 

  Hardcover - USA - 1st edition.

Maps

• 

  The map illustration in the book.

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	While Rhyme and Reason are powerful, they need Milo to do anything with their power.
Bechdel test?	Fail	I think Rhyme and Reason are the only two women, but they don't talk much.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	Race isn't mentioned, but from the illustrations, everyone appears white.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Quotes

• Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things.
• "You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons."
• What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.
• The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.
• But just because you can never reach it, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth looking for.
• For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.
• Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.
• "That's absurd," objected Milo, whose head was spinning from all the numbers and questions. "That may be true," he acknowledged, "but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?"
• Today people use as many words as they can and think themselves very wise for doing so. For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many.

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