A Christmas Present for the Pun-loving Child by Griselda Heppel
This time last year I opened the Christmas month by waxing lyrical over one of my favourite books as a child: The Magic Pudding , the Australian children’s classic by Norman Lindsay. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster By Book, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=14265163 So this December I thought I’d follow that by enthusing about another great favourite: The Phantom Tollbooth by the American author, Norton Juster. This glorious fantasy novel, bursting with puns and wordplay, leads Milo, a boy with nothing to do except drive his pedal car, into the Kingdom of Wisdom which has been rent asunder by disagreement between the two brothers ruling it. In Dictionopolis, King Azaz the Unabridged (a title I fell in love with on the spot) maintains that words are more important than numbers, while at the other end of the land, the Mathemagician insists, from his fortress of Digitopolis, that - yes, you’ve guessed it - the reverse is true. As a result the princesses, ...