Book Review: The Maze in the Heart of the Castle by Dorothy Gilman

Stars: 4 out of 5

Pros: Entertaining allegory on dealing with grief

Cons: Doesn’t quite stick the landing

The Bottom Line:

A grieving Colin

Goes on quest to find answers

Weak ending; still good

Journey with Colin Through the Maze

When I finally decided to branch out beyond Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books, I wasn’t going to venture to her young adult novels since those were harder to find. But after finding that The Maze in the Heart of the Castle played a part in her adult novel The Tightrope Walker, I had to track it down and give it a read. 

This is a hard book to pigeonhole. It is partially a book with a fantasy setting. Not that it involves wizards or magic but more unknown realms. More than anything, it uses these elements as allegory. 

The story follows Colin, who has recently lost his parents. He’s struggling, as you would expect for any sixteen-year-old who was in that situation. So when a family friend tells him that there is a castle on Rheembeck Mountain that might hold the answer for him, he sets out. When Colin arrives, he learns he will have to journey through a maze in the castle to find what he is looking for. Will he find it?

This book is essentially a series of challenges that Colin faces along the way. While that gives us more of an episodic narrative, in this case, it works. I was always anxious to see what would happen to him next and how he’d deal with the next complication. 

As such, Colin is the only character we see in the entire book. But even those he meets along the way are strong and help bring their sections to life. 

It’s the allegory where things fall a little flat for me. Obviously, the challenges Colin faces along the way represent various responses to grief. And I liked the way Colin grew from each stop he made. But when we reached the climax, I just didn’t feel like it quite worked the way I wanted it too. The allegory didn’t reach the climax I was expecting. But maybe that is the point, what getting through grief looks like for one person is different for someone else. 

I do have to comment on the history of this book. As I said earlier, it was originally mentioned in The Tightrope Walker, where what happened to the fictional author drove the story. Then, several years later, Ms. Gilman actually wrote the story and published it under her own name. That kind of thing is very fun to me. 

I’m glad I tracked down The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. Even if the ending didn’t quite work for me, I still enjoyed the book.