Phantom Tollbooth is utmost fantasy and "pure gold" - that theme, that plot, and Norton Juster's writing style. And don't forget the many parts when he intrudes inside the story, which sometimes explains a moral.
The very first thing I notice is the theme, which is definitely educational. The first thought I came up about the book was "literature about literature". This book speaks in a literature manner, yet in a logical way. In page 34, "When they began to count all the time that was available, what with 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year, it seemed as if there was much more than could ever be used." And how letters that were used less tasted less good than the ones used everyday in the Word Market. And homophones, as the Whether Man, whom rather check whether weather's coming than if there is any weather.
On page 26 is an author's intrusion. "You weren't thinking, and you weren't paying attention either." These intrusion's, although contaminate throughout the entire book, is rather hard to find, in my opinion. Compared to Charlotte's Web by E.B, E.B makes them rather easy to get because it describes something about life in a paragraph, and most of the time the word 'life' is in that certain paragraph. Phantom Tollbooth, on the other hand, has intrusions starting from sentences to paragraphs, even quotes. Some are hard to find, yet some are truly easy to find.
Sometimes, you can see morals deeply engraved in your thoughts. On page 117, for example, one of the quotas were: "Then one day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went." Once I finished reading this quote, I began to think, "Moral: Enjoy things in life. Don't worry about looking at your shoes, look around you or you might get into a car accident...wait, how can you even cross a street without looking at anything but your shoes?!"
And as what that Phantom Tollbooth Appreciation said,
"Mazel tov, Milo, Norton, and Jules!"
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