Anyone who has a passion for words and wordplay will enjoy reading The Phantom Tollbooth. In this charming children's book, author Norton Juster takes us on an adventure with his main character Milo, a young boy who enters a chaotic place called the Kingdom of Wisdom and finds that to restore order in the kingdom, he must save the banished princesses Rhyme and Reason.

When the story begins, Milo gets home one afternoon expecting to go through the same humdrum after-school routine he always goes through. But on this particular day, he arrives home to find a tollbooth waiting to transport him to a faraway place. Soon, Milo is traveling through the Kingdom of Wisdom, seeking to rescue Rhyme and Reason with the help of his companions, Tock the Watchdog and the Humbug.

Along the way, Milo meets some interesting and clever characters, such as the Whether Man (not to be confused with the Weather Man, "for after all it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be") and Kakofonous Dischord, Doctor of Dissonance, whom Milo meets on the outskirts of the Valley of Sound. Page after page, Juster's clever puns and witty plays on words make his characters memorable and his storyline entertaining.

On his journey, Milo travels to several places within the Kingdom of Wisdom, learning useful things along the way. In Dictionopolis, for instance, he discovers the abundance of words and the importance of choosing the right word for the right occasion. On his way to Digitopolis, a land ruled by numbers, Milo ends up on the Island of Conclusions. There, he decides to himself, "From now on, I'm going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything," and he learns that "you can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions."

Armed with the knowledge he has gathered on his journey through the Kingdom, Milo finally reaches the Mountains of Ignorance, where he and his faithful companions dodge and outwit various demons and ultimately save the princesses Rhyme and Reason. In the end, Milo is transported back to the present with a newfound curiosity about the world and a greater appreciation for learning.

Juster's humor throughout the story is at times subtle, at times downright silly, but often clever and thought-provoking, making this book an enjoyable read for young and old alike. They say there's a child in all of us, and The Phantom Tollbooth truly is a children's book for all ages.

On of my favorite books ever.

Now this is my kind of children’s book! I just know my child self would have adored this unique story that is so reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland(which was my absolute favorite). It’s wonderfully abstract, plays with language and has the best coded message you could give a child. A true classic indeed.

“Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.”

The Phantom Tollbooth offers some genuinely funny and clever writing. With some very smart wordplay and life lessons in every chapter, the book feels like a delightful read.

Okay, so . . . I'm just going to say this right off.

I LOVE THIS BOOK.

I can't promise that you'll love it, too. It's not one of those "classics" that practically everybody will love, or at least like--it's a strange, fanciful kind of tale, and I could definitely understand how many readers might find it confusing, disturbing, or just plain boring. But I read it when I was seven years old and absolutely adored it. And by that, I mean I loved it the way I haven't loved any other book before or since. This book is a part of me. I don't think I'd be the same person I am today without it.

If you know a kid who's smart but shy, who loves to read and loves to learn, and maybe feels a little "out of things" with their friends because of it--give them this book. You might just change their life.

And to anybody else who, like me, has read this book and been changed for the better by it, I'd like to say one thing:

"Many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."

You're welcome.

Well I've had this book up on my goodreads shelves for a long time but had no particular idea what to write about it save: Clever playful little book about a boy who drives through the phantom tollbooth of the title and winds up on a quest to rescue the Princesses Rhyme and Reason. Witty. Until this morning. First I read Lisa's review, then I went for a walk. Then a thought blown out of the bending branches of a tree fly via my ear directly into my mind, that it was curious that a freewheeling adventure starts with a tollbooth, with its associations of paying for access. Indeed our hero does have to make a token payment, but then I recalled The Talking Parcel, in which the youthful heroes travel to their adventure by train, and I believe it is the case that in the Harry Potter adventures the children also travel by train  as though Kings Cross isn't crowded enougheven at the end of Narnia it is by means of a train accident that the final characters transfer via death in life to life everlasting. It would seem crude and low even by my own  complete lack of standards to make a cultural point here about the differences between the USA and Britain in terms if individualist car driving versus collectivist sharing of train journeys  with the communion of train picnics revealed through children's writing, but today that's all I've got.

After reading this book, I've decided that whosoever drilled it into our heads about puns being the basest form of humour can go screw himself. (no pun intended)

This is such a wonderful book about Milo and the Watchdog and his incredible adventures through both language and mathematics. Full of inventive language and puns, it makes me sad that Norton Juster didn't write more children's books. This on is abfab and a must!

4.5 stars

In a nutshell, this holds up really well upon reread. The wordplay is somehow even more clever than I remember, the characters are as lovable as ever, and for me the whole thing is just wrapped up in so many fond memories of reading out loud with my little brother.

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n  CONVERSIONn: 13.35 / 15 = 4.5 stars

Prose: 9 / 10
Characters & Relationships: 9 / 10
Emotional Impact: 8 / 10
Development / Flow: 7 / 10
Setting: 10 / 10

Diversity & Social Themes: N/A
Intellectual Engagement: 4 / 5
Originality / Trope Execution: 5 / 5
Rereadability: 5 / 5
Memorability: 5 / 5

I'm torn. Torn because I always find it hard to rate children's books and torn because while this started out SO WELL it got a little bit too nonsensical for my liking.

The Phantom Tollbooth starts out as a delightful cross between Dr. Suess and Lemony Snicket, but quickly makes its way towards Alice in Wonderland territory where all the characters speak in riddles and become increasingly maddening until nobody is making any sense at all and the idea of moving forward seems almost hopeless.

It's definitely a very clever book and the characters are very endearing (despite being so annoying), but the numerous puns and allegories become a bit tedious after a while, and I have to admit that when the journey was over I was probably just as exhausted as Milo.

Reading "grown-up" literature is excavating the human soul, the adult soul: a mangled mess of contradictions and self-deceptions, screwy motives and the odd self-adherent logic of artistic creation. But Literature (capital ell) is a pyrrhic battle between message and evasion: one must avoid moralizing outright, must avoid overt allegory, but must never be too subtle, too veiled, lest you be resigned to snobby undergrabs and many rubbish bins. The Phantom Tollbooth is a strange beast: decidedly accessible to children, but remains lovable to adults. It's championing of the struggle against moral short-cuts, boredom, and mental waste is timeless, ageless, and remains prescient, even to me: a grown person 52 years after it's publication!

My grandmother has always said: "only boring people get bored" - I am guilty of sometimes serving this packaged wit cold when a friend laments "I'm bored!" but I think forcefully throwing this book at them would be a better remedy. What is signifed in my grandmother's aphorism is that interested people are interesting, and more importantly are never idle. My family (paternal side) is a hard-working, conservative, New Englander family: we don't watch much television, we read lots of books, we listen to NPR and read the Wall Street Journal, we somewhat self-indulgently talk about the cultural decline in literacy and how we are not a part of it. But the story of Milo is one which is both entertaining, lovable, but also cautionary. By no means is Milo a bad child, a dull idler, but rather he has not found passion yet. He is bored because his urban living, his deadening routine has stayed access to the bliss of potentiality.

n  The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.n

We are plagued, as a modern, urban society by the two-headed monster of routine. Routine comforts us, it gives us an escape into the dull and Terrible Trivium: the small tasks which comfort us and distract us from important, difficult work and choices. Our society is filled with spineless and indecisive people (the Gelatinous Giant) and those who feed us half-truths, who coddle us into a mire, into a trap (Monster of Insincerity): they are not villains, and these flaws do not define all people, but are characteristic in turn. Our weaknesses, our daemons, are our horrible defenses, our cozy citadels in the mountains of Ignorance. It is not the absence of bad habits (hours of dull television, bad reading or no reading) that marks an individual's decline, but rather the presence, the support, of our defenses. The demons of the mountains of Ignorance are impotent without our compliance, they feed on our weakness for what is easy. If we allow the glittering sovereigns of Rhyme and Reason to go fugitive in their empyrean prison, we lose our grip on true happiness, we become boring, we become easily bored.

Thankfully, there is nothing boring in The Phantom Tollbooth: its play with language is unrivaled certainly in children/young-adult literature, and rivals even the masters of play (Joyce, Nabokov, etc) in the grander schema. With a dual reverence for words and numbers, rhyme and reason, and a prevailing apotheosis of time, beyond the value of currency: something never to be wasted, Juster champions all forms of mental activity and cerebral play. I can imagine no better way to introduce a bored student, particularly one ahead of his class, to the ever-infinite vistas of imagination and invention than to hand him or her this book.

n  

“It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault."

"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.”

n

Since age ten have read Norton Jester’s The Phantom Tollbooth For myself, my son, and students.

Still owning the paperback copy gifted to me by my teacher, Mrs. Flieger. Also purchased an anniversary Hardcover copy many years ago.

Upon finding an audio version on the library Overdrive app grew excited to have this read to me for a change. Whoever says we're ever too old to be read to is clueless of its joy at any age. Especially for an aspiring children’s series writer