I read a lot. I would say between 6 and 8 books a month plus magazines, short stories, news articles. I'm further inundated with media through the internet, movie theaters, and the glory which is Netflix through my Wii. On top of all this, I have a master's degree in children's literature and I am always seeking out the best children's and YA literature out there.
Sometimes I find something incredible (see the forthcoming Philip Reeve piece), but usually I am nonplussed and, occasionally, my heart gets broken. Such is the story of N.D. Wilson's 100 Cupboards and its two sequels.
As we have all been told, familiarity breeds contempt, and my familiarity with traditional sword-and-sorcery quest tales has long since reached full saturation. Wilson's first book 100 Cupboards begins what one hopes will be a very promising, very different type of fantasy story.
The young Henry York moves to his aunt and uncle's farmhouse in Kansas after his adoptive parents are kidnapped while on assignment in a foreign country. He is given a room in the attic and one night awakes to strange noises behind the wall and pieces of plaster in his hair. He, of course, investigates (otherwise, there wouldn't be a story).
What he finds are 99 cupboard doors in the wall and a compass dial for unlocking each one individually. He manages to open some and glimpse worlds not in Kansas. One in particular strikes a nerve with him and he begins to wonder if he is a transplant from another place.
What makes 100 Cupboards so interesting and different is that it explores the feeling all children have that their parents are not their parents, that they are from some far off place. The book deftly compares the brightness and reality of Kansas with the brooding mysteriousness of "the other place." Henry questions what he knows about his past and his identity, and when he finds a means to travel (via the 100th cupboard, located elsewhere in the farmhouse) to the other worlds, he realizes that his suspicions regarding his origin are true.
The book ends with a climactic battle between good and evil - good in his Kansas family and evil in the form of a witch from one of the other cupboard worlds. What is important is that Henry chooses to stand with his adoptive family, identifying with the people who have supported and loved him.
Wilson, however, denies his own premise in the second and third books, Dandelion Fire and The Chestnut King. These texts become quest fables in a second-rate Middle Earth knock-off, a world populated by cardboard cutout maidens, fairies, soldiers, and kings. The trees are paper-mache and the stars sputter with failing electric energy. Henry finds his "real" family in the world beyond one of the cupboard doors and he must quest to save "his world" from an attack by the witch who featured in the climax of 100 Cupboards.
He rides horses, shoots arrows, swordfights, etc. etc. but he doesn't really ever return to Kansas. Kansas, in fact, has been all but cut off from the cupboard worlds. Henry no longer exists as part of the Earthly human race.
The reader is left to wonder why 100 Cupboards exists at all. The trilogy feature two totally different narratives forced onto one protagonist. The lovely, atmospheric, nostalgic questioning of one's own past and place is struck down in favor of the much easier to swallow "adventures of a chosen one."
Why must they all be chosen, be princes in disguise, have quests? Why can't they explore, in an imaginative and compelling way, the questions that all children ask themselves. Who am I? Why am I here? Who are these people who surround me?
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