OK, so I’m in the library (the local public, not my employer), and I want to push Margaret Mahy on my Perfect Non-Reader, because, you know, Margaret Mahy is made of pure awesome (note: contents an estimate). I pick up two books of more or less similar heft: Tingleberries, Tuckertubs and Telephones and The Horribly Haunted School, and I say which one of these would you like to check out and take home, the pirate one or the ghost one? And my Perfect Non-Reader says can’t I have both? Because it’s a library, and she ain’t stupid. So home they go, and I read Tuckertubs, and it was just about the best book ever. And I figure that I won’t read the ghost one, because seriously, that’s the path to disappointment and sadness and whatnot, right?
Only, of course, I do read the ghost one, because it was in the house for three weeks, and I know it’s short, and it’s by Margaret Mahy, so it’s pretty much inevitable that I’ll be headed over to the library shelf thinking I want something light and short and funny at some point during the three weeks. Right? Of course right.
The good news is that I was not disappointed. One thing that I love about Ms. Mahy’s books is that—look, anybody could have come up with the basic idea (boy who sees ghosts gets sent to a School for Seriousness, which in an unpredictable twist turns out is haunted) and then just written it straight. Ms. Mahy came up with the main idea, and then worked in the Jigsaw Puzzle Championships, a pathologically honest used car dealer, the perils of a large vocabulary, and, oh, half-a-dozen other crazy things. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s a lot like the sort of thing you sometimes find in a writer’s first book, where every idea they have ever had gets thrown in, higgledy-piggledy, except that (a) Ms. Mahy makes it all work somehow, and (2) she’s written a thousand books, and umpty-’leven of them are like that.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Oh hey, looks like our library owns a bunch of these. *adds to list*