OK, so I am a huge Louis Sachar fan from Wayside School days, but my favorite book of his as a kid was Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes. It was the funniest book I’d ever read (though I have a feeling one of the reasons I reread it as much as I did was because I could picture my middle school crush so clearly as the lead, he was the class clown type).
I was too old for Holes when it came out, but I read that and the companion book to “Dogs” (Someday Angeline) when I was in library school and trying to catch up on kids literature I missed. I loved both, but as a young woman, I specifically recall how both of those books had a romantic subplot for the adult supporting characters that truly made me swoon! Holes fans know what I’m talking about, of course, with Sam’s iconic, “I can fix that.” In Someday Angeline, it’s Angeline’s dad, an insecure garbage collector trying to raise a super-genius kid, and her teacher, Miss Turbone, who her dad thinks is “Mr. Bone.” Miss Turbone visits his house out of concern for Angeline and when he realizes “Mr. Bone” is a lady and Miss Turbone realizes at home she’s “Mr. Bone,” she cracks the fuck up and puts her hand on Angeline’s dad’s arm and I was like “OH SHIT THEY ARE VIBINNNNNNG.” Maybe the real problem was I was such a lonely grad student who so desperately wanted someone to love her that I was finding chemistry in children’s chapter books.
Whatever the case, I was very excited to learn that Sachar wrote a book for adults, seeing as he was so good at tiny glimmers of romance in his kids books. It was such a delight reading an author I loved as a kid writing FOR ME. I think that more children’s authors should write books for their adult fans. That’s the trend I want to see happen. Maybe a lot of them do this already and I’m just ignorant of it. But The Magician of Tiger Castle should hit it out of the park for any adult longing to relive the feeling of Holes or any of Sachar’s kids’ books that lean more dramedy than pure comedy.
The book is narrated by the titular magician, Anatole, who is immortal or at least in very very very very good health because he is taking a tour of the Tiger Castle in our present day even though he was the magician of it in the Renaissance era. The Tiger Castle is the center of the vaguely Mediterranean, since fallen kingdom of Esquaveta. Anatole is more of an alchemist than a magician, a master of potions, and he’s been ordered by the king and queen to use his talents to solve a romantic problem: their daughter, the Princess Tullia, is refusing to go through with her contracted betrothal to the King of Oxatania because she has fallen in love with a lowly scribe’s apprentice named Pito. Anatole is told to drug Tullia into submission, but he has a fatherly relationship with the young princess, and convinces her parents to allow what he considers a more humane option: a potion that makes Tullia forget Pito. What starts as an involved but relatively straightforward task falls apart piece by piece until Anatole and the two former lovers find themselves on the run from the castle and its hungry tiger. (We also eventually learn how he came to be so long of life.)
The book has all of the elements that makes Holes hold up so well on an adult reread: engagingly quirky characters and situations, an undercurrent of dread, twists lightly set up and satisfyingly revealed, the occasional fart joke, and lucky for me, a charming romantic side-plot. Anatole, Tullia, and Pito are all extremely lovable people who have as many failures as they do successes, making it a very heartrending adventure. I admit I was a little sad the romance wasn’t more of a focal point, only because I enjoyed the little hints of it and am curious what a full-blown romance would be like under Sachar’s hands, but it probably makes more sense that the framework of his adult books mirrors his kids’ novels.
Still, if he wants to go there, I’ll be first in line for a Louis Sachar cozy romance and perhaps after that a less cozy one I’M JUST SAYING the man can write chemistry.
A must-read for fans of Holes and/or fans of The Princess Bride.
