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A review by saroz162
The Maze in the Heart of the Castle by Dorothy Gilman
2.0
Originally, I read this book when I was 11 or 12 years old, and since then, I've always remembered two things: first, the great title (I do like a nice long title), and second, the gnawing sensation that it went a little bit over my head at that time. Nearly two decades later, I decided to give it another try, along with its companion volume, The Tightrope Walker. The Maze in the Heart of the Castle is a strange meta-fictional conceit in that quotes from it, and descriptions of sequences from it, first appear in Tightrope Walker five years earlier, where Gilman treats it as the product of another author and the protagonist's favorite book. It's made out to be a sort of ur-children's book, a beautiful old tome with important allegories to return to again and again.
By actually sitting down and writing Maze for real, then, Gilman fashioned a pretty good rod for her own back. This is a very slim book, really - it's 220 pages of large print - but it's clearly written to be "weighty." The prose has a vaguely Arthurian tone that tends to be reserved for much shorter fables and legends; it's more than a little pompous in places, and there are parts where Gilman is baldly saying, "Hey kids! You should be learning something important about life here." It's not subtle at all, and it frankly lacks the engaging quality of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Last Unicorn, which I think it may be trying to emulate. (There are sequences that bring both of those earlier novels to mind.)
That said, it's not awful. It does actually pick up as it goes on and more dialogue becomes involved. There's at least one encounter that I really enjoyed - one with a character called the Conjurer. (They're all named things like that.) Overall, though, I can't shake that feeling that Gilman was trying to write a philosophical book for kids, and because she set out with that goal, the result got bogged down with its own importance. It's really too heavy for a small child - say, under 10 - but the story is too simplistic for most preteens. I can completely see, now, why it left me discomfited in my own childhood. While I had expected that to be an indicator of my own inexperience at that age - emotionally, I was a very "young" 11 or 12 - I think, really, it just showed up the limitations of the novel. I probably needed a Last Unicorn at that age (a book I never actually read as a child) - not The Maze in the Heart of the Castle.
By actually sitting down and writing Maze for real, then, Gilman fashioned a pretty good rod for her own back. This is a very slim book, really - it's 220 pages of large print - but it's clearly written to be "weighty." The prose has a vaguely Arthurian tone that tends to be reserved for much shorter fables and legends; it's more than a little pompous in places, and there are parts where Gilman is baldly saying, "Hey kids! You should be learning something important about life here." It's not subtle at all, and it frankly lacks the engaging quality of The Phantom Tollbooth or The Last Unicorn, which I think it may be trying to emulate. (There are sequences that bring both of those earlier novels to mind.)
That said, it's not awful. It does actually pick up as it goes on and more dialogue becomes involved. There's at least one encounter that I really enjoyed - one with a character called the Conjurer. (They're all named things like that.) Overall, though, I can't shake that feeling that Gilman was trying to write a philosophical book for kids, and because she set out with that goal, the result got bogged down with its own importance. It's really too heavy for a small child - say, under 10 - but the story is too simplistic for most preteens. I can completely see, now, why it left me discomfited in my own childhood. While I had expected that to be an indicator of my own inexperience at that age - emotionally, I was a very "young" 11 or 12 - I think, really, it just showed up the limitations of the novel. I probably needed a Last Unicorn at that age (a book I never actually read as a child) - not The Maze in the Heart of the Castle.