Shelly's Book Blog

Here is another Newbery Medal winner, this one from 1948. Despite having been written in the same decade, Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pene duBois, fortunately does not suffer from the problems I complained about in yesterday's Rabbit Hill post. Twenty-One Balloons is an adventure story about a man who, in 1883, sets off in a giant hot air balloon, intent on living in the air for at least a year. Strangely, even though he takes off from San Francisco and heads out over the Pacific, he is later rescued by a ship in the Atlantic. The story of how he traveled so far and what happened to him during that time makes for exciting reading.

It turns out he crashed landed on a small island called Krakatoa, which is the name of a real island in Indonesia. The cataclysmic explosion of the island's volcano at the end of the story is also a real historical event. There is plenty of fantasy here as well, because the book's hero, Professor Sherman, finds the island inhabited by a group of twenty families who have used money they got from selling some of the island's abundant diamond supply to create many wonderful, inventive contraptions, such as a Balloon Merry-Go-Round and a bed with "continuous sheets." They have built themselves fantastic, international styled homes and live a sumptuous, carefree life on an island that no one else seems to even know is inhabited.

This book boasts a wonderfully rich vocabulary and sophisticated style, but unlike Rabbit Hill I would not recommend this story to kids younger than, say, 5th grade. The plot is actually rather simple; the book's strength lies in the incredibly imaginative, original, and funny world the author has created. No furry animals, but plenty of adventure and humor to keep the pages turning.