You'll never be bored with a Tollbooth (The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster)

Member Name: Alien

Product:	The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
Date:	13/07/00 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very funny, fast moving

Disadvantages: The only book Norton Juster wrote!

Milo is always bored but can't be bothered to do anything. One day he gets home from school to find a mysterious parcel which proves to be a DIY Tollbooth, the sort where you pay to travel on bridges or foreign motorways. Milo pays his money, drives his toy car through, and enters an incredible world of weird characters obsessed by words and numbers. For anyone, young or old, who loves playing with words this book is compulsive and extremely funny. Meet the Tock, the watchdog who thinks killing time is a dreadful crime, travel in the car with no engine (it goes without saying), visit the Island of Conclusions (its easy to get to it because you just have to jump to Conclusions), and eat Subtraction stew, which you really can eat between meals without spoiling your appetite. If you get into trouble with the police, you'll have the choice of a long or a short sentence from the courts, and you'll love the awful Dynne. Be there with Milo when he encounters the Mathmagician and the Dodecahedron who has twelve faces to help him express his feelings, and follow him on his quest to rescue the princesses Rhyme and Reason whose castle in the air is guarded by Demons of Ignorance such as the Terrible Trivium. They were banished when the Mathmagician and King Azaz fell out over the question of whether words were more important than numbers, or vice versa.
This is a book for 9 year olds up to great-grandparents. It's brilliant for boys who can read but are perhaps not really into fiction. It's the sort of book teachers should read to their class.

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