Be Careful What You Wish For: The Book of Story Beginnings

Kristin Kladstrup's fantasy novel poses the venerable problem of the effect upon the present of time travel into the past and a deeper question about the nature of human happiness at any point on the time continuum.

The novel begins with Lucy and her parents on the way to their new home, a century-old brick farmhouse in Iowa, inherited from a maiden great-aunt. Lucy is not pleased with the transition, but is fascinated with a family mystery revealed by a letter, delivered posthumously, from her Great-Aunt Lavonne. In this letter Lavonne reminds them of the unsolved disappearance of her fourteen-year-old brother Oscar, whom she claims to have watched rowing away into an ocean which amazingly appeared around their house one night in 1914. The letter recounts a dream which Lavonne apparently had just before her death, in which Oscar calls back to his then little sister the words "Lucy will explain."

Intrigued, Lucy begins to investigate the family mystery, unearthing Oscar's journals and an ancient volume called The Book of Story Beginnings, in which Oscar had written the beginning of his disappearance story--ocean, rowboat, and all. Her father is also researching the story in Aunt Lavonne's alchemy notes without a breakthrough, until, after overhearing a money quarrel between her parents, Lucy writes the beginning of a reconciliation story about her father and mother in which her father is indeed a magician. What Lucy wishes for begins to come true, with unforeseen consequences. With the help of a potion he concocts from Lavonne's notes, her father changes into a raven and flies away over the now re-materialized ocean. The barn cat Walter reappears as the vanished Oscar himself, still dressed in his 1914 garments. Eventually Oscar and Lucy realize that they must live out both story beginnings they have written into the book and travel to the universe in which their stories are being played out to recover their own present lives.

After many complications too confusing to recount, Lucy's father is returned to his own body and the three return to the farmhouse, to the surprisingly minor consternation of Lucy's mother and relatives. Oscar, however, still has the basic problem of the time traveler. If he uses their new found magic, he can return to his family in 1914 and live out his life as if he had never disappeared. But in doing so, he takes the chance of gravely changing the lives of those in the present. If not, he must live with his nephew's family and never see his long-dead parents and siblings again. The theme of the book is revealed in a conversation with Lucy at the end of the book:

"But to be glad for what I did! It's like being glad I murdered them!" [said Oscar.]

"But you didn't murder them! They went on with their lives. They chose to be happy. They had to, even if they never forgot you, or never stopped missing you." said Lucy. "You're just choosing," she said. "You're choosing to be happy about what's happened.... The happiest endings--I think they're endings that feel like beginnings.... We're your family now, Oscar. You should choose us."

Kladstrup's theme, that indeed we all write the beginnings of our own life stories and must make the conscious choice to be happy within them, is a solid one, well realized in the full sweep of the novel. The middle of the novel, however, is a muddle of fairy-tale-like characters and subplots which go on a bit too long and resolve themselves too abruptly. Kladstrup writes much better when she is dealing with the real people and their real-life choices in the novel.

A novel which deals more tightly with the time-travel dilemma is Mary Downing Hahn's
fantasy A Time for Andrew, in which look-alike relatives swap places over an 80-year time span to prevent the first Andrew from dying of a disease for which the second Andrew has, of course, been vaccinated. Hahn, however, stays relatively clear of Kladstrup's more philosophical theme of our own roles in our personal happiness in the life stories we choose to live out.

It is a deep and unresolved question of life and literature as to whether we indeed set the stage for our own lives or whether circumstance, accident or the will of someone or something outside ourselves lays down the basic plot line of our lives. Although I wish Kladstrup had somehow managed the alternate universe subplot better, I give her points for engaging this larger theme as she did.