Over-scheduled girls are the new bored boys

The Lost Track of Time
Paige Britt
320 page
Copy: ARC, publication date: 31 March 2015
Read: not sure; probably back in January
Spoilers: A fair bit, including ones for The Phantom Tollbooth
Crossposted: Life Piled on Life, Librarything

I adored this book. Scholastic has really hit it out of the park for the 2015 (more on this in later reviews), but this one has the making of a classic. Remember The Phantom Tollbooth? Or, at any rate, hopefully you remember it? (When I finished reading this book, and gushed about it to my best friend, she informed me that she hadn't actually read Tollbooth, and if she were living near me, I would have thrown copies at her. As it was, I just mailed one)

Most of the point of Phantom Tollbooth, aside from the word-play--complete with vocabulary: that's how I learned words like dodecahedron and din and doldrum and a lots of words starting with letters other than d--and the sheer adventure of the story, was that one needs to use one's mind. It was aimed at teaching young readers that boredom is laziness and that intelligence creates the best kind of adventure. It is, in short, truly inspiring.

But in multiple re-readings over time, I came up with a few quibbles. Firstly, the main character Milo is a boy. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with being a boy. I suppose we need a few of those hanging around, and, frankly, at this point in children's literature, it is actually becoming more and more difficult to find books for intelligent boys who don't like spaceships or Greek gods. However, Tollbooth was published in 1961, and the only female characters are the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason, who have disappeared and are waiting to be rescued up in their Castle in the Air. Although I love the book, we don't need more princesses-in-need-of-rescue and, to be perfectly frank, why the fuck didn't a pair of sisters named Rhyme and Reason rescue themselves? (In more sympathetic moments, I suspect that they were taking a nice vacation and Milo's rescue was something of a nuisance). So: feminism is quibble one.

Quibble two: from what I can see, as neither child nor parent, kids don't seem to have any time to be bored. Sports, and lessons, and enforced hobbies; camps, clubs, classes; the horror that is smart phones: I don't actually think that middle class kids with well meaning parents actually have time to get bored. Getting bored is really important--as long as one doesn't get too bored, of course. Getting bored is what makes one's imagination kick into gear, it's what makes us go on adventures. No one goes on a true adventure because it would look good on a college transcript.

The Lost Track of Time addresses both of these quibbles. To be honest, my beef with Tollbooth was mostly subconscious until I came across this book. Penelope, the intrepid adventurer, suffers under a well-meaning organizational development type mother who runs her daughter's life like Penelope is another event to plan. Their various schedules--during which every fifteen minutes is accounted for--might be humorous to the target audience (8-12), but was verging on tear-jerking for me. To never have any free time! It is bad enough as an adult(ish), but for a child! Heartbreaking and all too much a part of reality.

Penelope, like Milo, escapes her predicament into an allegorical world of word-play and adventure, complete with anthropomorphized puns (my favorite was the Wild Bore), and a mythic figure to be rescued (The Great Moodler, moodling being day-dreaming). Her journey teaches the reader that schedules, just like boredom, can always go overboard.

Recommended for over-scheduled girls (if they can sneak away from their mothers to read it); for grandmothers to give to over-scheduled girls; and for anyone who has been an over-scheduled girl (warning: in that case, there could be tears.)

-Mercutia