The Forgotten Door

By -

 The Forgotten Door, by Alexander Key

As a kid I enjoyed the books of Alexander Key, who I don't think was terribly well-known for anything besides the Escape to Witch Mountain books, which were turned into not-very-good Disney movies.  But he wrote quite a bit of other stuff too, and I remember this one.  Some years ago I picked up an old school library copy, but I hadn't actually read it since I was a kid.

Little Jon is out watching the stars with his family and neighbors when he stumbles over some rocks and falls -- right into a different world.  The door had been sealed up long ago but something broke.

Jon lands in an unknown mountain area, with a cracked head and a busted ankle.  He follows a deer down the mountain and winds up being taken in by a kind family, but suspicious neighbors, frightened by Jon's oddness, become more and more intolerable.  How can Jon ever make it home?


The Key stories that I've read all feature a world of people who are human, but nicer -- they live in harmony with nature, can communicate telepathically with animals and each other, and are very peaceful.  Children brought accidentally into this world are confronted with unkindness and violence, and are bewildered by it.

I enjoy this story and the ones like it, though they're a little simplistic.  All of Key's books are available on Kindle, but in my opinion they're on the expensive side.

Comments

  1. Jenny @ Reading the EndJanuary 21, 2021 at 4:49 AM

    I loved this story as a kid! I haven't reread it recently, but I think I own it, and I am definitely very fond of it. It is not unduly surprising to me to learn that it's a trifle simplistic, though. :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. Karen K.January 21, 2021 at 6:11 AM

    This looks so familiar -- I'm pretty sure I read Escape to Witch Mountain but it may have been the novelization of the film! The cover looks so much like the Scholastic books we used to get. There was a whole series about witches by Ruth Chew and I think I still have them packed away somewhere. This brings back memories!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanJanuary 21, 2021 at 11:12 AM

    I'm so glad that others have read and loved this book too! Karen, I would love to see those Ruth Chew books. I remember reading them all the time, and I haven't seen them in ages -- it's too bad they fell out of print. Kids today would like them too!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Deb Nance at ReaderbuzzJanuary 22, 2021 at 7:07 AM

    I used to read that one aloud to my fifth graders every year. I think I need to reread it for myself soon.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more