The Phantom Tollbooth

There once was a boy named Milo who found everything a waste of time. School was a bore, games were a chore, and the world, which was so very large, felt terribly small and empty. One long afternoon, he arrived home to find an enormous, mysterious package in his room. It contained one genuine, unassembled turnpike tollbooth, complete with precautionary signs, coins, and a map to a country he had never heard of. With nothing better to do, he put it all together, hopped into his small electric car, and, choosing the destination “Dictionopolis” at random, drove slowly through.

Suddenly, his room was gone. He was speeding along an unfamiliar highway under a brilliant sun, the world shimmering with colors he'd never seen before. After a confusing encounter with the Whether Man in the land of Expectations, Milo's daydreaming mind led him astray. The road grew monotonous, the colors drained away, and his car slowed to a halt. He had arrived in the Doldrums, a listless place where thinking and laughing were against the law. Here, he was surrounded by the Lethargarians, small creatures who spent their days dawdling, lingering, and procrastinating. He would have been stuck there forever if not for the arrival of a large dog with the body of a loudly ticking alarm clock. This was Tock, the watchdog, whose job was to protect time. “Since you got here by not thinking,” Tock explained, “it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.”

With Tock beside him, Milo drove on to Dictionopolis, a kingdom where words grew on trees and were sold like produce in a great word market. Here, they met King Azaz the Unabridged's bickering cabinet members, who spoke only in synonyms, and witnessed a furious brawl between the Spelling Bee and a well-dressed insect called the Humbug, a master of exaggeration and empty talk. The fight upended the entire market, and Milo and Tock were promptly arrested by Officer Shrift, a man who was also the judge and jailer. Sentenced to six million years in prison, they were cast into a dungeon where they met a kindly old woman. She was not a witch, but a “Which” - Faintly Macabre, the king's great-aunt, once in charge of choosing which words should be used. She told them the sad history of the land: how the two sons of the King of Wisdom founded Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, the city of numbers, and grew to despise one another. In their pride, they banished their adopted sisters, the beautiful Princess of Sweet Rhyme and the Princess of Pure Reason, to the Castle in the Air, leaving the land without sense or harmony.

Freed from the dungeon, Milo was rushed to a royal banquet where the guests literally ate their words - the speeches they made were served to them on plates. Over a dessert of half-baked ideas, Milo suggested that someone should rescue the princesses. King Azaz, moved by the idea, declared it a splendid quest. To Milo's surprise and the Humbug's horror, the king “volunteered” the boastful insect to be their guide. Azaz gave Milo a small box containing all the words he knew, telling him, “With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome.” And so, with Tock the watchdog and the reluctant Humbug, Milo set off on the perilous road toward the mountains of Ignorance.

Their journey carried them through strange and wondrous lands. In the Forest of Sight, they met Alec Bings, a boy who floated three feet off the ground and saw through things, and visited the invisible city of Reality, whose citizens were too busy to notice it had disappeared. They watched Chroma the Great's orchestra play the colors of the sunset and stumbled into the Silent Valley, where the Soundkeeper had locked away every sound in a great fortress. Milo, with a clever bit of thinking, managed to steal the sound of the word “but,” trap it on the tip of his tongue, and use it to shatter the fortress walls, releasing noise and music back into the world.

After a brief and dizzying stay on the Island of Conclusions - a place you arrive at by jumping - they reached the kingdom of Digitopolis. Here, they met the Dodecahedron, a shape with twelve different faces, and descended into the number mines where digits were dug from the earth like precious gems. They dined with the Mathemagician, the ruler of the land, on subtraction stew, which only made them hungrier the more they ate. The Mathemagician was just as stubborn as his brother Azaz and refused to help, until Milo, using pure logic, proved that their constant disagreement was, in fact, something they could agree on. Defeated by reason, the Mathemagician gave Milo a magic staff - a pencil - and pointed the way to the Castle in the Air.

The final part of their journey was the most terrifying. They climbed the dark Mountains of Ignorance, a wasteland populated by the demons of misinformation and bad habits. They were delayed by the Terrible Trivium, a faceless man who assigned them petty, endless tasks, and tricked by the demon of Insincerity. They barely escaped the clutches of the Gelatinous Giant, who takes the form of whatever is near him because he is afraid of standing out. At the base of the final peak, the Senses Taker almost trapped them forever by stealing their focus with tempting illusions, but the sound of laughter broke his spell.

They scrambled up a dizzying spiral staircase to the Castle in the Air, a beautiful prison floating in the sky. There they found them: the gentle Princess of Pure Reason and the lovely Princess of Sweet Rhyme. But as they met, the demons below chopped the stairway down, leaving the castle adrift. Thinking quickly, Tock realized that “time flies,” and he carried them all - the princesses on his back, Milo on his tail, and the Humbug on Milo's ankles - gliding down through the darkness just as the demons swarmed to attack.

Just as the loathsome creatures of Ignorance were about to engulf them, the armies of Wisdom appeared on the horizon. King Azaz and the Mathemagician, finally united, led the charge, routing the demons and driving them back into the shadows. A great carnival was declared, and Milo, Tock, and the Humbug were hailed as heroes. The princesses were home, and the brothers promised to rule together in harmony. The king then revealed the quest's greatest secret: it had been completely impossible. “But if we'd told you then,” he said, “you might not have gone - and, as you've discovered, so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”

Milo said his tearful goodbyes and drove his little car back toward the tollbooth. He passed through and found himself back in his own room. It was still the same afternoon; only an hour had passed. The next day, he raced home from school, eager for another adventure, but the tollbooth was gone. In its place was a letter explaining that it was needed for other children who knew the way to no-place. For a moment, Milo was heartbroken, but as he looked around his room, he saw it with new eyes. The world outside his window was bursting with things to see and hear and discover. There were books to read, puzzles to solve, and worlds to imagine. He had a great deal to do, right there, and he knew now that the real adventure was learning to see the wonder in it all.