Book Report: The Book of Story Beginnings

The Book of Story Beginnings is Kristin Kladstrup’s first book, which is just as well, because I suspect that if I discovered that she had half-a-dozen books out, I would probably run out to the library and read them all in a couple of weeks and get totally sick of them and not enjoy them at all. This way, by the time she has another book published, I’ll be all eager and whatnot.

This is a really clever and sweet book. It’s a trifle Young Adulty, but not fatally so, and the conceit is very good indeed. There’s this Book of Story Beginnings, you see, and when the kids write a Story Beginning in it, the story begins, and they are caught in it, and have to ride it out until it ends. There are four stories begun, by various people, and they wind up intersecting, the characters of one driving the plots of the others, until they manage to resolve each other. One of the stories is the Main Story of this book, but that doesn’t mean it’s more important than the other stories with which it gets intertwingled, just that it’s the one we happen to be looking at most closely.

Since characters in one story have written the Beginnings of other stories, there is some sense that some of the characters are figments of the imagination of others, but again, that doesn’t make them less important, or less like people. The character who wrote one story realizes that he himself is in a story, and that it has to follow the rules of a story, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to have a happy ending, or that he gets to do whatever he wants. The danger is all the more real for being storybook danger; the love is all the more real for being storybook love. The losses are all the more real for being storybook losses.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.