This was the latest book being taught and discussed in my daughter’s class, but with a state exam coming up, they took a little break. But we didn’t: we decided to run through it as fast as we could. It was also a book on my wife’s shelf that she’d encouraged me to read for the longest time.

Not only is it a kid’s book, not only is it fantasy, but it’s also got some odd turns of phrase, puns, and playing on words galore. Milo’s bored, and suddenly he finds a car and a tollbooth in his room. He hops in the car, drops a coin in the booth, and before long he’s on the road to Digitopolis. From there he’s in the doldrums, jumps to conclusions, and has a bunch more adventures in wordplay. Soon he finds himself on an adventure with a watchdog named Tock and The Humbug to rescue Rhyme and Reason and save the kingdom.



Loved these characters. Quirky and weird is the name of the game. And each one has a quirk that makes some sense, to whom Milo plays the straight man every time. Kind of reminds me of Costello in a lengthy version of “Who’s On First?” The plot takes off about 2/3 of the way through, when the adventure to rescue the princesses really begins. They’re chased all over by demons and tripped up all over.

But it’s the ending, and the relationships, and the sweet connections that really got me. Oh, boy. Rhyme and Reason have a few paragraphs that tell me why education is worth it, why learning new things and exploring ideas is one of the keys to a good life. I took screenshots and might just put a few quotes up in my office. Same for what Milo learns at the end. Great life lessons told in an endearing way. That knocked it into the 4.5-star category for me. The kind of book I wanted my daughter to read.

And so, she did. She was looking for something to do, so she sat on the couch and crushed it. Several weeks before her class. Makes a dad so proud.

Find the kid in your life and read this with them!

This started out cute, but after the sixty-first figure of speech I couldn't take it anymore. It's as if a fourth grade teacher went on an acid trip and started spouting nonsense.
I'm sure if I'd read this book when I was eight I would've loved it. Now I'm twenty-eight and I couldn't stand the tedium. If I ever hear another pun or play on words, I think I'll vomit all over myself.

Surprised I haven't rated this before. A big part of my childhood was reading and this book was a favorite

Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth made me happy. I loved the puns and playfulness. Even a dumb kid like me could appreciate the cool jokes. It's the language of words and numbers in a place that you can actually reach. Not "Learning is fun!" propaganda but "Hurry up, slow poke!" adventure stories in the vein of all the best ones. It's good for you.

I loved that Milo wanted to be away when he was home and away when he was home. No phantom tollbooth ever appeared to take me away (at least that wasn't in this book). I'd probably have gone on the adventure and then pined the rest of my days for another one... I was really good at missing the point of these kinds of stories. Have fun at home? Make friends at home? But I missed *those* friends!

In my lower self-esteem moments I'll still identify with The Terrible Trivium. I'm probably weird...

p.s. They made us watch the cartoon in elementary school. I started my infamous "1970s cartoon walk" in part because of this. Too bad it wasn't actually from the '70s. I suck.

P.s.s. And I never tagged this under "dogs" ("myonlyfriend", duh!). I really do suck. I'm sorry, Tock!

Norton Juster lived around the block from me when I was a kid. We all steered clear of his house because our parents told us he was a miserable bastard.

That's not true; when I asked my mom about it last year she was horrified. She said he was a really nice man and she has no idea where I got that terrible but clear memory.

Anyway, I read this like fifty times when I was a kid and is there an Italo Calvino fan in the world who didn't start with this, the child's introduction to metafiction?

I wasn't as impressed with this book as many of my friends. Perhaps that is because of my high expectations for the book or perhaps because of my preferences in writing style. So those who love this book can use one of those two reasons to blow off my review. However, the fact remains that I was not very interested from page to page, and if not for a commitment to a book group, I am afraid I would not have had any desire to finish it.

In style the book seems to be written for a particular age group ranging from 8-11, depending on the vocabulary and maturity of the reader. And, for the preteen sense of humor, the wordplay was appropriate and would be quite funny to the intended audience. However, the wordplay was really the only interesting aspect to the book, and I'm tempted to say as much for the joke books my niece reads to me.

The plot was simple and was secondary to both the wordplay and the multiple morals of the story. In fact, a new moral was introduced with every chapter (some chapters containing more than one moral), and each chapter was only a few short pages long. This was the main drawback to the book. Not to say that morals aren't important in a work, but too many morals are detracting. Introducing, then immediately leaving a moral behind decreases the likeliness that it will be remembered once the book is finished.

My other main problem with the book was the lack of description to help the reader enjoy the fantastical and quite creative world Juster introduces. Here one moment, and there the next, the reader is left wondering...How did Milo find his car again (he was lost only a moment ago)? Where are they? What do they see? This book, whose main moral is to teach a child to notice the world around them, simply forgot to take a look around. (The spectacular scene with Chroma and his orchestra being the exception.)

Overall, an interesting book, leaps and bounds above the other children's literature of Juster's contemporaries, but not my favorite.

I don't remember much about this book, except that I loved it to pieces, and that the subtraction stew always made me really hungry.

I read this years ago when my son was in grammar school I remember enjoying it together.

An Entertainingly and Stimulatingly Didactic Allegory

A bored, disinterested boy comes home from school and finds a strange package containing some coins and rules, a map, and a Tollbooth. Soon Milo is driving through the Phantom Tollbooth and into the Lands Beyond, passing eagerly through Expectations and stopping dully in the Doldrums where, luckily, he meets Tock, the watchdog who hates wasting time (Tock’s body is a watch that goes “tick,” while his brother Tick’s body goes “tock”). In Dictionopolis, they meet the Humbug (who’s always the first to be wrong) and learn from the good “Which” Faintly Macabre that ever since the twin sisters Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason were banished to the Castle in the Sky by the feuding rulers of the city of words and its rival Digitopolis, everything in the land has been off kilter. Milo volunteers with Tock (and the reluctant Humbug) to go rescue Rhyme and Reason, an impossible quest because the Castle in the Sky is far away through difficult places like Reality (easily invisible) and Illusion (irresistably seductive), the Valley of Sound (strangely silent), Conclusions (easy to jump to, hard to leave), and the Foothills of Ignorance (populated by demons like Trivium, Senses Taker, and Insincerity), and he must make King Azaz the Unabridged of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis agree to permit the return of Rhyme and Reason, though the brothers never agree on anything, each thinking his own domain supreme.



Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) is, then, an allegory, not a Christian one like Pilgrim’s Progress but an allegory of thinking, learning, and observing, of being actively and thoughtfully and curiously alive in the world.

It has some points reminiscent of the Alice books of Lewis Carroll, in the language humor and imaginative fantasy, but Juster is much more allegorical and pedagogical. Juster’s reader learns to be more alert and aware and perceptive and curious about words and numbers and life generally, and his novel is more didactic (or pedagogic), Carroll’s more nonsensical. That said, both Carroll and Juster enjoy the workings of language and the use of logic (or illogic) to manipulate and understand the world and other people. Juster excels at writing language fantasy, making figures of speech and expressions literal, as when a character says of a car, “It goes without saying,” and the vehicle starts moving if nobody mentions it, or as when Milo requests a light meal, and he and his friends are served colored beams of light, or as when someone suggests that time flies and—You get the idea.

According to Juster, a bigger inspiration for his novel than the Alice books was his childhood reading of the Oz novels, apparent in the many outree figures met and left by the hero, though L. Frank Baum is less didactic.

One of my favorite moments in Juster’s novel is when Milo encounters the smallest giant in the world, the tallest midget, and fattest thin man, and the thinnest fat man, and they all look suspiciously the same, the point being “It's all in how you look at things.” One of the interesting things I learned from reading Leonard Marcus’ The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth is that during the writing of his novel, Juster and illustrator Jules Feiffer, who were friends living a floor apart in an apartment house in NYC, had a creative competition whereby Juster would write things in the story he thought Feiffer would never be able to illustrate (like this scene with the smallest giant and tallest midget, etc.), forcing Feiffer to rise to the challenge, as when in this case he just used the same illustration of the same man four times with different labels!



I also love the moment when Milo meets the .58 of a child belonging to the average family of 2.58 children (the boy is able to drive the three tenths of a car owned by his average family!).

Other neat points in the novel are when the Mathemagician turns Milo on to the interest of numbers—the biggest and longest numbers, the numbers of greatest or smallest magnitude, fractions, infinity, etc.—with the aid of his magic “wand,” a normal pencil, with which you can do anything you can think of.

Juster’s playful, entertaining, mind-opening didacticism appears in moments like when Milo learns that if you don’t pay attention to your surroundings, they’ll become invisible, or that if you accept the all the ugly sounds in a modern city, you’ll forget how pleasant ones sound or how appealing silence is.

And when the Soundkeeper gives Milo a list of all the different kinds of silence—

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? ... Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause in a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're all alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful, if you listen carefully.”

And when the Mathemagician explains where they keep the tiniest number in the world,

“in a box that's so small you can't see it--and that's kept in a drawer that's so small you can't see it, in a dresser that's so small you can't see it, in a house that's so small you can't see it, on a street that's so small you can't see it, in a city that's so small you can't see it, which is part of a country that's so small you can't see it, in a world that's so small you can't see it... Then, of course, we keep the whole thing in another box that's so small you can't see it—”

Jules Feiffer’s hundred or so monochrome illustrations are sketchy, dynamic, playful, and perfectly collaborate with the text.



The audiobook reader David Hyde Pierce is fine. He does "British" accents for King Azaz and the Mathemagician, a French (?) accent for the the Dodecahedron, and an American accent for the narrator and Milo. He enhances the story.

I’ve read the book several times over the decades, and each time I feel a little bored at the start (not unlike Milo) and very stimulated by the end.

After the first 50 pages I know this will be on my bedside table for the rest of my life!

Someone in a review said “The Phantom Tollbooth” was their first favorite book. Oh, how I wish I could make that claim [mine was “The Story of Babar”].

I didn’t start “really” reading until I was late into my teens; and so, with a few exceptions like E. B. White and Beverly Cleary, I didn’t read children’s literature – nothing in the independent readers or young adult genres. A few months ago I resolved to remedy that sad fact by reading those books I skipped while growing up.

What a treasure I’ve discovered. Thus far I’ve read eight or nine books by Roald Dahl (now one of my very favorite authors), plus “Peter Pan,” “The Children of Green Knowe,” “Mary Poppins,” “The Borrowers,” “A Bear Called Paddington,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the lovely and bucolic “Wind in the Willows” and “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (a true masterpiece on many levels).

Of all I’ve read Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” has had the most profound effect. Over the decades it has been favorably compared to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” However, the work it most closely resembles is L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Like Dorothy, Milo in “Tollbooth” is a child removed from the boredom of everyday life and transported to a magical land full of wonders, mysteries and dangers. On his trek to find his way home he meets a score of memorable characters – most notably the clock dog Tock. Milo and Dorothy are cousins of a sort; they both discover that there’s no place like home and that home is a place filled with wonders and magic if only you open yourself up to experience them.

Claims have been made that Juster’s wordplay and puns are too advanced for younger readers. So what? George Bernard Shaw once said: “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself,” which is a tenant I hold with. This book’s sophistication simply enhances its multigenerational appeal (not unlike all those Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies with classical and pop culture references only adults understood). “Tollbooth” was pure pleasure to read and had me grinning like the Cheshire Cat from beginning to end.


Here is something special from The New Yorker about the books 50th anniversary http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/20... enjoy.

A story based on puns and word play; about learning, noticing, and that wasting time is a waste of time. Very creative and imaginative, with lots of tongue-in-cheek potshots at some of the demons of existance: ignorance, boredom, misdirection… I have listened, which was a good medium for the story, but I would need to get a print copy for the quotes. The story is without Rhyme and Reason, quite literally, at least up until the end. Rhyme and Reason are princesses - which is how the story is made, making phrases literal… and Milo needs to get Rhyme and Reason back so Wisdom can once again flourish (wisdom is the kimgdom). This jumping around can get confusing, especially to conclusions.

The book is delightfully freewheeling, and even has a message: stop wasting time and start learning things, because ignorance is evil. I can get behind that.