Paperback Wing Nuts

Since the Lyndon Johnson administration, Meta Cranky has had a torch burning for Shadow Castle, a 45-cent book that her youngest older brother (YOB) brought home from a Scholastic book fair. Look at the cover and you're smitten: there's princess Gloria's flaxen hair flowing well past her ass, and a dreamy Disney-quality castle in the background. Prince Mika is practically drooling on himself, he's so overcome by her fabulousness. Bluebell, the princess of the Blue Fairies, gets a similar over-the-top treatment inside the covers, except that she's a brunette with a curly do. Elves, goblins, swamp fairies, a vegetarian dragon. It's Middle Earth with better illustrations.

A cursory check at Amazon shows that Meta Cranky is among a legion of wing nuts who are unable to be ironic, or even objective, about Shadow Castle. Amazon reviewers confess to stealing these books from libraries and loathing former friends who borrowed, then lost, their personal copies. The book you discover when you're 9 is apparently the book you carry with you, intact and beloved, into geezerhood. Those of us who drank the SC Kool Aid are not going to get all lit crit-y and describe the revealing contrast of fairy and mortal, or analyze the dangerous goblin/swamp fairy alliance. Instead, like YOB, we'll tell you where we were when we first read it (top of a long-gone mimosa tree) and declare, with fervor and sincerity, "It's just that good."

Because of ridiculous sentimentalists like Meta Cranky and her YOB, used paperback copies of SC sell for $28. Someone who is not a liberal arts major, do the math and figure out where your portfolio would be now if you'd invested in 45-cent paperbacks instead of those lousy 401Ks. Even in these difficult economic times, however, Meta Cranky will tighten her belt to obtain the new EXPANDED edition of SC with previously unpublished material. More fairies! Creepier goblins! Those poor slobs reading the books on the Times best-seller list don't know what they're missing.
--MCG