Reviews: (by author)

Duvoisin, Roger. Petunia. New York: Knopf, 2000. ISBN 0-394-80865-7. $15.95.

John and Charles, the protagonists of St. Giles's Fair, return in this second of three volumes. In the first book, they were split into adult- and child-selves, and the adults had to rescue the children from the seductive false world of a witch. In this book, the now-whole boys fall prey to a trap even more clever. The twisted wizard and word-master who imprisoned their mother in the first volume has now tempted the boys, along with Susan, a character new to this volume, with presents that give them tremendous power to do good. But the gifts work only in the Land of Dreams. And so the children are drawn by their own better natures to abandon the real world, easing the pains of those who live within dreams. "Is suffering any the less suffering," asks Charles, "for being in a dream?"

But if they remain in the dream, the children will be unable to free their mother. And so the dreamguards of the children, the powerful animal-helpers of their dreams (who are also the stuffed animals in the real world) embark on a mission to try to save the children from themselves. The animals do so even in the knowledge that returning to the real world will allow the children to grow up and eventually forget the animals who saved them. Both the courage and the unselfishness of the animals are tested, and children and animals alike must give up a blissful present for a future that is certain to hold loss. This is, indeed, a novel about growing up.

But it is not truly a novel that is neatly summed up in a retelling of the plot. The book unfolds through a labyrinth of stories, stories within stories, stories within dreams within stories, as well as joke, poems, proverbs. Stories are left half-told, hinted at but untold, and somehow, never truly finished. Despite the Shakespearean double wedding at the end, this is not a book that is completed in any sense. It is a book that suggests the ways in which stories remain always incomplete, forever waiting to be told again and so merely held in abeyance. It shares the richly poetic and magical soul of the first volume, with its same evocative prose and beautifully imagined settings. In fact, I found this book to be even more skillfully done than the first volume. It has symbols that manage to resist becoming symbolism, a sense of seriousness that manages to avoid become dull, and a lightness of touch that seems to proceed from making stuffed animals (even extraordinarily unusual stuffed animals) the main actors on this novel's magnificent stage.

Recommended reading level: Age 13 and up.

Reviewed by Jamie Madden

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