My mom remembered having read Shadow Castle when she was a kid, and was tickled to see it back in print, so I got it for her for Mother’s Day, and then borrowed it when I was visiting her for Christmas. I was bothered by a line or two of casual racism (e.g. “This was a very long time ago, and there were no people in this country but primitive Indians” (18)) but other than that, this was a pleasing book to read over the course of two very rainy December days. It’s a fun series of stories, and I like Olive Bailey’s sweet illustrations, perhaps especially the ones at the start of each chapter, like this:
When the book opens, we meet Lucy, who is nine, and who ordinarily hangs out in the woods around the home where she lives with her grandmother, befriending squirrels and rabbits and generally amusing herself. But one day she goes into a deeper part of the woods and starts following a little white dog, who eventually leads her to a tunnel into the mountainside, and then through the tunnel into an enchanted valley where there’s a castle. There Lucy meets the dog’s owner, a man who introduces himself as Michael and proceeds to take her inside the castle, which is inhabited only by “dust and shadows” (12). The shadows, it turns out, are cast by former inhabitants of the castle who now are in Fairyland, and Michael tells Lucy a series of stories about them all, starting with the tale of a fairy prince named Mika who travels the world and rescues (then marries) a beautiful captive princess named Gloria. Mika and Gloria have twins named Robin and Meira, and we hear their stories, too. There are fairies and magic and goblins and a vegetarian dragon and a witch and a djinn, and Lucy listens in rapt attention to all of it for the whole day, before having to dash off home again, but not before Michael gives her his dog and a magical ring and tells her she can come back to the enchanted valley whenever she wants to.
I wish there were a sequel to this in which Lucy would go back into the enchanted valley and actually have some bigger adventures of her own—I’d like her to have more of a chance to be an active character, as opposed to just listening. In the very beginning of the book, she’s a bit nervous as she’s following the little white dog through the forest, but she steels herself to keep going like this:
Lucy shivered and went on again. “This is an adventure,” she thought. “You can’t have an adventure if you stop in the middle.” Besides, she didn’t want to lose the little dog. (5)
I think Lucy’s got sufficient independence and pluck to be a proper heroine on her own, and I wish she’d gotten the chance to be, but I still liked Shadow Castle, even though it wasn’t Lucy’s story.
Leave a Reply