The Phantom Tollbooth

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster is one of my all time favorite books.  It follows the adventures of Milo, a young boy who is bored with his life.  When he is going to school, he wants to be going home, when he is going home, he wants to be going to school.  Then one day he goes into his room to find a curious phone booth with a rule book and map.  He takes his toy car and journeys to a far off land.  His first adventure is in the Dulldrums, a place that you get to when you stop thinking.  However, with the help of a watch dog, Tock, he gets out and finds his way to Dictionopolis where words are bought and sold.  He meets king Azaz and learns of the two princesses Rhyme and Reason who were banished to the Castle in the Air in the Land of Ignorance.  With them gone, the kingdom has been in ruins because King Azaz cannot agree on anything with his brother the Mathematician of Digitopolis.  Milo sets out on a journey with Tock and Humbug to rescue the princesses and bring back Rhyme and Reason to the kingdom, Wisdom.  He meets many characters along the way like Alec Bings, who grows towards the ground and Chroma who is the conductor of everything.  Milo even conducts a sun rise.  In Digitopolis he eats subtraction stew, which makes him hungrier and hungrier and he climbs the stairs to infinity.  In the Mountains of Ignorance, Milo and his friends encounter many demons, including Terrible Trivium and Senses Taker.  Milo has to use his wits to outsmart them.  Finally he makes it to the Castle in the Air and rescues Rhyme and Reason. After his long journey Milo returns home to find that only a few moments have passed.  Full of new wisdom, Milo has a new appreciation for everything in life.
This wonderful novel seems quite advanced for children, but having read it when I was younger and then reading it again now, I noticed that I actually did understand a lot of the jokes.  It was not as over my head as I would have though.
The book was illustrated by Jules Feiffer is a comic strip artist and author.  He was an assistant for Will Eisner in the 40’s, working with him on The Spirit.  His simple drawings in The Phantom Tollbooth are really great.  I was really impressed with the amount of emotion he could get across in just a few ink lines.  Feiffer has won countless awards, including an Oscar in 1961 for his short animation Munro.
Norton Juster was born June 2, 1929.  When he wrote The Phantom Tollbooth he was studying to be an architect in Brooklyn, NY.  Even after finishing the book, his architecture remained his main focus.  Both the Phantom Tollbooth and The Dot and The Line, another story he wrote, where adapted to animated filme by Chuck Jones.