The best books with characters on an unplanned or obsessively-planned journey

This is a fairy tale. I’ll state this upfront because at first glance, it’s a bit of a hard read. And why is it a hard read? Because—to me, anyway—it feels like wish-fulfillment fantasy on steroids. It’s like the rantings of a terribly abused boy. Of course, much fiction—especially fairytales which is this book’s genre—is wish fulfillment. But the story feels very uncomfortable. Mio is so over-the-top happy about having been transported into the kingdom of his father the king that one feels as if one is listening to a pitiful delusion.  I found myself reading the book with two minds. One mind kept saying, “Dive into the reverie and joy of a boy who has found his dead father in a faraway land and who discovers that he’s important to the world.” And simultaneously, my other mind was thinking, “Oh my heavens! This little boy needed so much love. Was this story recorded at a mental hospital?” It’s very imaginative and beautiful and I suspect that a parent reading this story will feel a sadness about the story while the child being read to will feel something else entirely. But the parent will leave the reading session thinking about the need children have for love.

This book had me cracking up. I would recommend this book for kids aged seven to ten but I also think adults would love reading it. Oliver is the child of adventurers who now want to settle down. Well, the itch to adventure is still pretty powerful. So, of course, off they go again. Oliver has to find them so he too goes off to search for them. On his journey, he meets some other creatures, including a mermaid, an albatross, a depressed island, and some very obnoxious weeds. I’m being super non-spoilery and vague here because I want you to happen upon the silly puns and wordplay by yourself. I will also resist the urge to tell you what sea wigs are. 

What I like about this story is that Oliver is a normal kid. His sense of adventure came about second-hand, and he had no great urge to go on a journey. But his mother and dad had created an open-minded and open-hearted kid who takes in the wounded, eccentric, and rejected beings he meets as his found family. When the world needed him to be adventurous, he simply did what came naturally. It’s really quite sweet. Yes, they save the world from the evil bad guy but what I love is that our hero is the way he is because of his parents. It gives us parents hope that something good in us will rub off on our children. I love this book.

I love time travel stories. Stories where protagonists swap lives with other people are so much about acculturation and “passing.” Dislocation, confusion, etc. aside, the main issue is to not be found out. In the story, Charlotte is not always herself. Sometimes she’s in a boarding school in the fifties and sometimes she’s back in time at the same boarding school in the First World War. So we’re dealing with a borrowed life here. The life that Charlotte sometimes borrows belongs to Clare. Charlotte has very little in common with Clare. And even less knowledge of how establishments like this worked back in the day. Some quick learning and imitative skills are needed if she is not to be caught. For instance, she has to deduce what others expect and require of her. But she also has to not lose herself in all this pretense. 

When I came to the US from Jamaica in the West Indies, I had a lot of things to sort out. What were the hip slangs that American teenagers use? What should I not say if I didn’t want to seem ridiculous and stupid? Maybe coming to America as a teenager has had a permanent effect on me. I still have something of an immigrant cultural disorientation. Of course the flip side of that disorientation is that I’ve developed a skill of putting myself in someone else’s shoes. For better or worse.

As a kid, I accidentally memorized the first three or four paragraphs of Edgar Allen Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart". My memory is not as great as it used to be but my love for odd, tragic figures still remains. I love this book. It’s rhapsodic, mesmerizing, and spellbinding. It’s also bitter and obsessive. Give me a bitter character and I am hooked. The protagonist Colin is crippled and very cynical about humanity. He finds a seal on the shore and identifies with it. Perhaps because it’s clumsy on land but so graceful in water. His obsession with the seal made me somewhat uncomfortable but maybe that’s just my mind working overtime. After a while, his obsession leads him to become obsessed with living underwater. This is where the seal lives, this is where his true family lives. Now, not all disabled characters—mercifully—are vaguely psychotic. And imagination is a double-side medication, so to speak. It heals and it can hurt. There are certain moments in this story where our hero’s internal journeys are dangerous but the rhapsodic merging of obsession and science fiction creates a tense psychological fantasy that makes the desire to escape and to go on a journey so dang palpably tragic. This is a beautiful read and a hard read.

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a fable, and as with all good fables, you’re going to find yourself commiserating with an animal. Sprout is a hen who is past her childbearing years. There is no rooster around. Well, there’s one. But he’s got a partner. Childlessness is an unplanned journey for some, and the book shows the grief that many people in this situation might deal with. Just as we’re feeling there is absolutely no hope for our infertile, partner-less, hen, she ends up becoming a mother. But now another unplanned journey pops up. Well, decisions and sacrifices have to be made. 

There are so many reasons why I like this book. After my son was born, I was suddenly on an unplanned journey. I didn’t expect my son to be sickly and developmentally delayed and even now I still pray for a miracle for him. The main character in this story expected life to be different. For the most part, we take it for granted that we will have children, especially healthy ones. The book is also about coming to terms with old age as a woman. I’m 62. Not old age, of course, but old enough to realize that some will assign a woman of a certain age to cronehood.

This is a Korean book and I read it in translation. I know a bit about Korean culture but I’m sure I missed a few cultural illusions about the lives of childless women in patriarchal cultures.