I want to begin this review of Dandelion Fire by acknowledging at the outset that I am not an objective reviewer. Fathers of writers who produce works of genius are really up a creek. What are they supposed to do? Pretend like nothing happened?
Dandelion Fire is the second book in the cupboards triology, 100 Cupboards being the first. The third book of this series, The Chestnut King, is already written and handed in, and it is a corker just like the first two. For those who may have been worried about it, Random House fully intends to continue with this Nate business, and the wheels are already turning on the next series. I’ll keep you posted on that as well.
In the first book, Henry York discovered a wall of cupboards that led to other worlds. This happened when he was staying with his aunt and uncle in Kansas because he parents had been kidnapped in Latin America. Lots of stuff happened, and it was really exciting. No spoilers here. This book opens with Henry learning that his parents, who have been rescued, will be having him picked up in two weeks. Henry already knows that he is really from one of the worlds on the other side of the cupboards, and so he resolves to figure out a way to avoid going back to Boston. The book ends with some fascinating exchanges between Hylfing and Kansas. Like I said, no spoilers. Oh yeah, and a desperate last stand, a disappearing house, a glorious reunion, and a very important christening. This is one of those books which, if you make it through chapter seven, will cause you to miss your bedtime.
Without getting into the plot details — no spoilers here — I wanted to comment on three of the larger themes in the book.
First, this series of books has helped to settle the point from a discussion I was in about twenty years ago with some friends. At issue was whether it would be possible to write a story that overcame what might be called “genre bias.” For example, would it be possible to write a story that revolved around the numinous, while placing that story in a genre setting where the numinous almost never happens? Would it be possible to write a story as spooky as John Buchan’s The Groves of the Ashteroth, with that story set, say, just outside of Laramie, Wyoming, in the late nineteenth century? Not possible, thought my friends. I thought it was, and what Nate has been seeking to do in this series has shown convincingly that this kind of thing can be done. In his work, he has been consistently looking for the Americanization of magic. Why do so many writers persist in writing that all the portals to other worlds must be located in the UK?
And so this first point leads to the second. A common approach to magic assumes that power is over here, and not over there. An unbelieving mind wants to find the power spots and then use them everywhere else. The approach taken here in these books is to encourage the reader to start thinking about how God actually made the world across the board. What is the world, all of it, actually like?
And this is related to the third point — when Henry was lost as an infant, winding up in our world, the result was that he was never christened. Because of the importance of naming, because of how crucial it is to tell the right story the right way, the christening scene here is (in my view) the best and most powerful scene in the whole book. How we name is crucial. How we tell stories is foundational. And so those Christians who want books to shape their children (the way story-telling and naming is supposed to shape them) need to get these books into their children’s lives.