Into the Labyrinth - Hardcover

Townley, Roderick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689846150 ISBN 13: 9780689846151

Publisher: Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, 2002

Synopsis

What a relief when the old story-book is republished and the characters who live inside it suddenly discover they have Readers again -- lots of Readers!

Princess Sylvie finds herself rushing to get to her place whenever a new Reader -- whether in Boston or Bangkok -- opens the book. Her mother, the queen, is especially frazzled when the popular story is loaded onto the Web, a weightless, "virtual" world of unforeseen challenges.

To cope with the stress, Sylvie convinces the Writer to add a new character, who gives yoga instruction to the storybook's cast in those moments when they have time off. But stress proves the least of their problems as strange things start happening -- words get changed around, scenes disappear -- and Sylvie and her friends must launch themselves into the labyrinth of cyberspace to confront a twenty-first-century evil that threatens to destroy their world.

About this title

About the Author

Roderick Townley's first book about Sylvie, The Great Good Thing, was a Top-Ten Book Sense Pick, praised by Kirkus Reviews as "utterly winning...a book beloved from the first page." Its sequel, Into the Labyrinth, was hailed by the New York Times as "a hopping fine read." The present volume completes the Sylvie cycle.

Mr. Townley has also published the novel Sky, described by VOYA as "one hell of a book," as well as volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and literary criticism. He has two children, Jesse and Grace, and is married to author Wyatt Townley.

Reviews

Grade 4-8-The premise of this novel is that readers don't read a story, they hear a story as it is acted out by its characters, and "if the characters aren't there, living and suffering on the page before you, nothing makes sense." In this sequel to The Great Good Thing (Atheneum, 2001), Princess Sylvie's adventure story has been republished, and she and the other characters have to adjust to their new popularity as Sylvie's quest to do one "great good thing" before her marriage is repeated to reader after reader. After their story is uploaded to the Internet, the characters have to adjust to their new digital existence, and they start experiencing "wordpools," holes and changes in their story that endanger their existence. The protagonist ventures into the World Wide Web, visiting a variety of sites where she is offered real but tasteless cookies, to find and confront the force responsible for the wordpools. While minor characters remain flat, Sylvie is an appealing, thoughtful, and involving heroine, pulling the fast-paced plot to its satisfying conclusion. Like William J. Brooke's Teller of Tales (HarperTrophy, 1995), this story looks at the possible stories behind what we read, offering a picture of a world where seeing a screen saver or a scroll bar from the inside seems logical. Townley provides enough background to help readers unfamiliar with the first book while not distracting from his story.
Beth L. Meister, Queens Borough Public Library, Flushing, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Princess Sylvie and her family, characters in the out-of-print storybook introduced in The Great Good Thing, are overjoyed when their tale is republished. This sequel, Into the Labyrinth by Roderick Townley, explores the special challenges and unimaginable threats faced by the characters when they are uploaded onto the World Wide Web. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 5-7. Townley takes the ingenious conceit of his Great Good Thing (2001) to a new level in this sequel. With their swashbuckling romance novel back in print after decades of obscurity, and popular to boot, Princess Sylvie and her co-characters find the constant rushing from chapter to chapter heady but also exhausting--even after Sylvie engineers the addition of yoga therapist Rosetta Stone into a corrected edition. The stress level increases after the tale is uploaded as an e-book, for not only must the characters speak their lines without tripping over scrolling pages but they must also contend with a dragonlike "bot" (created, as it turns out, by a malicious young descendant of the original author) that rips gaps in the text and inserts characters from other books. Townley fills this plot with clever twists and predicaments, then sends his redoubtable young heroine sailing through cyberspace to confront, and delete, the fire-breathing bot. Readers with a taste for metafiction aren't the only ones who will be drawn into this grand, tongue-in-cheek adventure--though familiarity with the prequel will prevent some confusion. John Peters
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

"She's about to jump!" shouted Riggeloff.

"Cree! Skricket!" cried the thieves, as they turned into insects.

"You're twelve years old," intoned the queen. "It's time to think of marriage!"

The voices echoed all around her, till sometimes the girl wanted to put her hands over her ears. Still, it was a delicious noise. Sylvie had an amazing life, and she got to live it dozens of times a day, now that the book she lived in was back in print.

Her life, in print again! For years, there had been one known copy of her story, and it sat on a shelf in the second-floor bedroom of an old house. But now, through what seemed a miracle, the book was republished, and Sylvie suddenly found herself in living rooms and waiting rooms, apartments, bus stations, and the windows of bookstores.

Whatever a bookstore was. As far as she knew, The Great Good Thing was the only book in the world. Readers appeared above her with great regularity, their enormous faces peering down into her storybook world of villains and ladies-in-waiting, of spells and narrow escapes. The idea that they might also peer down into other stories never occurred to her. And if it hadn't occurred to her, it would never occur to her parents, king and queen of the realm, whose imaginations were limited to the words written for them. Finally it was Norbert Fangl, her tutor, who broke the news as they strolled one night by the Mere of Remind. A bony old fellow with sadly smiling eyes, Fangl was almost the only character in the story who was based on an actual person. In life he had been a geometry teacher, and he seemed to know everything, or could figure it out. Still, Sylvie didn't want to believe him.

"Does it disturb you, Princess," he said, "to think there might be other books?"

Sylvie thought. "It does. It's like being told there are other suns in the sky."

"There are other suns in the sky. Millions of them."

Sylvie laughed, her young cheeks bunching up. "Now you're making fun of me, Fangl."

He smiled kindly. "Am I going too fast?"

"You're not going fast, you're just talking silly."

"I'm sure you're right, Your Highness."

They continued along the curve of the shore, Sylvie doing a happy skip and not caring that mud was splashing her shoes. Tired though she was, she liked these midnight walks, when most Readers were asleep and the characters had time to themselves. The moon, always full, cast lines of wiggling silver over the water. Across the inlet lay the castle grounds with their woods and moonlit paths, and beyond them the dark turrets of the great structure itself. The distant moat gleamed weakly, sheeted with lilies, while over the whole scene drifted the delicious scent of newly printed pages.

"Although if there are other stories," said Sylvie, picking up the thread, "I'd like to know how the people in them deal with all these Readers. I hardly have time to catch my breath!"

"Most books are not as popular as The Great Good Thing."

"Really?" Sylvie felt pleased by the thought. "Really?" she said again. Her green eyes sparkled.

Just then a nearby bullfrog began a loud croaking. "Oooopen!" it belched. "Booook oopen!"

"Isn't it a little late for people to be reading?" said Sylvie with a little puff of a sigh. "Oh well." She gave her tutor a quick wave and hurried toward page 5 of the new edition, where her dialogue with the king began.

"Skraawk!" cried an orange-and-white bird, taking off from a rock. "Reader!"

"I know, I know!" cried Princess Sylvie, racing down the narrow white path between lines of words. She arrived, panting a little, just as the moon and several clouds lifted away and a boy's face appeared overhead, backlit by a reading lamp.

"Father," Sylvie declared in a firm voice, "I cannot marry Prince Riggeloff."

The king's crown was crooked and he had a cross look on his face. Evidently, he'd been napping in the anteroom. "Not marry Riggeloff?" he grumped. "For Heaven's sake, child, he is handsome, rich..."

"Kind, brave," continued Princess Sylvie. "Yes, I am aware of his qualities."

So it went, Sylvie refusing to marry before she did one "great good thing" with her life, Prince Riggeloff's bitter reaction, his thieves' stealing the castle treasure, the invisible fish saving Sylvie when she leapt from the cliff, the horrid-looking Keeper of the Cave urging the princess to kiss the wound on his forehead. Fortunately, the Reader yawned loudly and let the book close before the start of Part Three. Part Three was the most demanding section of all.

The moon came back on again, full as ever.

"Who on Earth was that?" snapped Pingree the Jester, a short, spindly fellow with a face like a walnut.

"A sixth-grader, I believe," said Norbert Fangl, "from a place called Kansas."

"Don't they sleep in Kansas?"

"Just wait," replied Fangl. "When the Japanese translation is finished, we'll have Readers all through the night."

"Don't they sleep?"

"Difference in time zones. They sleep when other Readers are awake. It's fourteen hours later there."

Fangl noticed the other characters were staring at him. "It's simple, really. You see, the curve of the Earth..."

"Oh joy!" muttered Pingree. He swatted his jingling cap against his leg and set it at an angle on his head.

"We'll get no rest at all!" the queen faintly wailed.

Fangl looked about him in surprise.

Sylvie whispered, "I'm not sure you should have brought up all that about translations. Now they've got something else to worry about."

"Good thing I didn't mention the Urdu and Icelandic."

"Are we going to have to learn all those languages?"

"It seems not. You're already in several European languages and no one seems to have noticed."

"We are?"

"You think in whatever language you're written in."

"Fangl, you are full of surprises."

"Um, excuse me, old fellow," said King Walther, draping an arm around the old teacher's shoulder and drawing him aside. He gnawed on the end of his mustache, as he always did when he fretted. "Explain to me again about this time-zone business."

Slowly the characters drifted off, each in his own direction, to get a little rest before the day began and new Readers opened the book.

"Sylvie," hissed Queen Emmeline, when they were alone.

"Mother, are you all right? Your eyebrow is twitching."

The queen, she noticed, was wearing more makeup these days, to disguise her lack of sleep. "You've got to talk with the Writer. Get her to do something!"

"What's the matter?"

"The matter?" The queen closed her eyes and shook her head a fraction of an inch. "This jumping up and down every five minutes, that's what's the matter."

Sylvie put a calming hand on her mother's arm. "I know we've been pretty busy lately."

"Busy! My dear, a queen likes to sit on her throne and reign, not scamper about like a...like a...whatnot!" She picked up her little brown-and-white Chihuahua and patted its head. "Even Lulu is nervous."

"Lulu is always nervous."

"Yesterday she barked through my whole scene by the drawbridge."

"I'll see if I can talk to the Writer."

"If you do see her," the queen went on, "ask if she can do something about this awful gown. I don't know what's wrong with it; it just hangs on me."

"You've lost weight, Mother."

The queen raised an eyebrow doubtfully, then glanced in the looking glass at the trailing gown of green silk. "Do you suppose?"

"It's obvious."

"I've never lost an ounce before."

"You've never been so busy before. You should see Prince Riggeloff. With all his racing around, he's practically swimming in his clothes."

The queen considered this. "I was wondering what was different about him. He's always looked so snappy."

"It's hard to be snappy when you're tripping over your cape."

The queen gave one of her rare smiles. "He did trip, didn't he?"

"I'll talk to the Writer," continued Sylvie, "if I can get her attention."

"Thank you, child."

"Try to rest. Things will be starting up soon."

Queen Emmeline nodded, but she wasn't listening. She was looking in the mirror. "I can see why you're the heroine," she said, in better spirits. "You always see the bright side. And those lines of dialogue! I could never manage saying all that."

"You get used to it."

"I'm too old to get used to it." Cradling the squirming dog, she glided off to her chambers. Princess Sylvie watched her go. She'd promised that she'd speak to Lily -- that was the Writer's name -- but meetings weren't easy to arrange. You couldn't just tilt your head back and shout. She had to wait till Lily had a dream that Sylvie could be part of. That happened less and less frequently, and Sylvie found it wise to make a list of things to bring up when they happened to be together.

"Mother frazzled," she scribbled. "Can she have fewer lines?" Then she wrote, "Alterations?" and slid the note into the pocket of her velvet dress.

The person she really wanted to talk to was the girl with the dark blue eyes. She always knew what to do. She might not be a whiz at logic, like Fangl, but she just knew things. Even the king consulted her. Where was she?

Sylvie stood fingering the gold locket that the girl had given her long ago. The princess clicked it open. There was her friend: the bright, almond-shaped face looking as if it could barely contain a secret, the suggestion of a smile playing about her small mouth. And those eyes, dark blue, undecided between mischief and mystery. Sylvie snapped the locket shut, absentmindedly rubbing the gold S on the lid.

The next day was busier than ever. It started with a librarian in Cleveland reading through most of Part One faster than Sylvie had ever known Readers could read. Whoever librarians were, they sure could zip through a book! The characters kept up as best they could, but the king's knights were sweating as they raced around in heavy armor pursuing Riggeloff and his thieves. In the midst of this madness, a very young girl in Maine opened the book with soft fingers and began sounding out the words of Chapter One: "'Father,' said Princess Sylvie, 'I cannot marry Prince Rig. Rigga.' Mommy, what's this word?"

At about the same time, a boy waiting for a school bus in Hackensack, New Jersey, fished the book out of his backpack and started reading where he'd left off the night before. Unfortunately, it was raining in Hackensack that morning, and cold droplets kept plunking down in the bedchamber during Queen Emmeline's scene with Sylvie. Finally the school bus pulled up and the book was shoved in the backpack.

"Sylvie," the queen hissed, "you've got to talk to the Writer!"

"First chance I get, Mother."

"It's not just me. Everyone's miserable. We can't keep up this pace."

"I know, Mother."

"How can you be so cheery?"

"I guess I'm just happy to have a book to live in again. There were all those years when we didn't."

"I hardly remember. That time is vague to me."

Sylvie looked at her mother with surprise. It was all so vivid. "Surely you remember when that boy Ricky set fire to the book we were living in."

Queen Emmeline frowned and nodded. "I think so," she said slowly.

"Ricky. Claire's brother Ricky. He was trying to make the pages look old by burning the edges, but then the whole book caught fire."

"That's right, and we escaped somehow."

"We escaped into his sister's memory."

"Was she that unattractive little girl?"

"Claire was a wonderful friend and she saved us. I would never call her unattractive."

"My dear, she had a very wide mouth and mousy little curls."

"She kept us in her memory for years when we had no book to live in. And when she grew up, she told our story to her daughter, Lily."

"I'm not saying she wasn't a fine person."

"And when Lily grew up -- "

"She wrote it down, yes. And here we are."

"Yes, Mother, here we are."

"A fine kettle of fish!"

Sylvie sighed. "Would you prefer the old days, when there was only one copy of the book and no one read us for ages at a time?"

"Much."

"Really?"

"Much-much-much."

Sylvie sighed. "Well, I'll talk to the Writer when I see her. Maybe she can cut back on your lines. But I can't promise."

As luck had it, Sylvie ran into the Writer that very night. Lily was not dreaming about the book exactly, but about something called a "talk show," which was to take place in a few days. From what Sylvie gathered from the dream, Lily was scheduled to discuss The Great Good Thing and how she had first heard the story from her mother, who had read it in a book her grandmother had owned decades before. Lily was always careful not to take credit for coming up with the plot.

Still, Lily admitted, it was gratifying to have an actual book in print and to see her own name on it. The money made a welcome change, too. Lily was able to buy a new computer to write on, and she immediately got herself hooked up to the Internet.

In the dream, Lily, looking pretty in a maroon pants suit and cream-colored blouse, was talking with a chuckling fellow with an upturned chin and his hair in a big, graying pompadour. The place didn't look a thing like the castle; there was not a turret or unicorn tapestry in sight. Instead of thrones, three chairs and a desk stood on a carpeted stage. Instead of armor, strange machines glided silently about, pointing first at the pleasant man with the puffy hair, then at Lily. This was one of Lily's Nervous Dreams, Sylvie realized, noticing numbers of brown mice nibbling at the gold fringe of the curtain and scooting along the backs of the chairs. One of the mice crept across the man's desk and stood on its hind legs to peer into his coffee cup.

When Lily was having one of her Nervous Dreams, you could never tell what might happen. Still, the man kept smiling. He spoke right at one of the gliding machines, and then leaned toward Lily confidingly.

"I just loved your invisible fish!" He chuckled and shook his head. "How did you come up with that one?"

Lily was smiling, but Sylvie saw the alarm in her eyes. "I didn't. Really!" A mouse poked its nose out of the sleeve of her blouse. Another crept up her neck. "That was just part of the story my mother told me." An electric saw backstage began screaming so loudly Lily couldn't hear herself speak.

"Look," she shouted over the hubbub, "here's Princess Sylvie now. She'll tell you!"

That was Sylvie's cue. A young assistant gave her a gentle shove, and she stepped onto the brightly lit platform while applause welled up around her. Sylvie was used to dreams, having appeared in enough of them in the past, so she threw herself into the part, happy to help Lily out, and especially happy to say lines that hadn't been pre-written for her. The sound of the power saw subsided, and the pleasant man invited Sylvie to take a seat -- a much more comfy chair than those hard old thrones she usually perched on.

"We've never had a fictional character on the show before," he said with a smile. "Is it true you never get any older?"

"That's right. I've been twelve years old since 1917."

"I bet there are a lot of women in the audience who would like to know your secret!"

Laughter surged toward her from beyond the lights. He exchanged banter with her for several minutes, then looked into a gliding machine and said he would be right back, although in fact he didn't go anywhere at all. Sylvie and Lily were the ones who had to get up and leave. That was all right; it was time for Lily to end this dream and start her day.

"Thanks," Lily whispered as they passed through the curtain into the backstage area. "You saved me."

"Glad to help. Say, before you wake up," said Sylvie, "there are a couple of things I wanted to ask." She told about the ill-fitting costumes and the jumpiness and irritability of several characters, including the queen's dog.

"You mean they're stressed out?" said Lily.

"Dressed up?"

"No, stress. Haven't you heard of stress?"

"I don't think so. I've never seen one."

"It's what happens when you're too busy and you don't have time to do what you know you have to do."

"Oh!" said Sylvie as they opened a door and started down a long beige hallway. "Then I guess we do have stress. Lots."

"Let me think about this," said Lily. "Maybe I can come up with something."

"Will you remember when you wake up?"

"Of course I will! I'm about to wake up now."

"And the costumes?"

"We're going into a new edition. There were a bunch of mistakes in the old one, and we want to get them fixed before we're uploaded onto the Web."

"The what?"

"Isn't it exciting? We're going on-line! People will be able to read the book right off their computers."

"What are you talking about?" Sylvie knew about webs; she'd admired how pretty they could be when strung with dewdrops in the morning sun. But she also knew how sticky and sinister a web could be when its owner was at home.

"I forget," said Lily, "you probably don't have the Internet in your world. You don't even have typewriters! Anyway, we want to make the changes before the book's uploaded, and I'll see if the illustrator can make some alterations for you. Do you still like your colors?"

Sylvie stopped and looked at the Writer. "You're good to us."

"Well," said Lily, beaming, "I love you guys."

Sylvie gave Lily's hand a friendly squeeze. "The colors are fine," she said. "I guess it's just this stress business."

"I've got an idea about that. A friend of mine has been helping me deal with my own stress."

"You mean you've got one, too?"

"One stress?" Lily gave a laugh. "I've got more than one. But this person has helped me. She's younger than I am, but she knows all kinds of things. What would you think if I wrote her into the book?"

Sylvie stared. "You're not supposed to change the story."

"I know, I know." They had arrived at a bank of elevators at the end of the corridor. This was where Lily was to ride upstairs into the waking world.

"Can this person really help?" Sylvie pursued.

"She helped me."

"Oh yes, I could see how calm you were during tonight's dream!"

"Don't be sarcastic, Sylvie. You're not a sarcastic character."

"Well, is there some way you can do it so you don't change the story?"

"I'll think about it. What if I wrote her in but didn't give her any dialogue?"

Sylvie considered this.

"She could be a background character, a shepherdess or something," Lily went on. "Then, when the book is closed..."

"She could help us. Oh, I like that!"

"Well, we'll see."

"Will you remember?"

"I said I would."

"Don't forget!" In fact, to be sure she didn't, Sylvie used her old trick of stepping hard on Lily's foot to make her wake up right away.

"Ow!"

"Go! Wake up!"

"All right, all right!"

The Writer stepped into the elevator and the door closed. At the same moment, the hallway turned from beige to misty gray, then faded entirely, replaced by the faint lapping of water. Princess Sylvie found herself alone at daybreak, shivering beside the Mere of Remind.

Copyright © 2002 by Roderick Townley

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689846150
• ISBN 13: 9780689846151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272