Book Review: The Book of Story Beginnings by Kristin Kladstrup

On a summer night in 1914, teenager Oscar Martin begins a story. He imagines that the fields surrounding his family's Iowa farmhouse transform into a sea on which he can sail away to find adventure. In an old notebook found among his mother's possessions, he begins to write his story, and to his astonishment, when he looks out his window, he sees that the fields have indeed been replaced by an endless ocean, and at the shore is a rowboat. He takes the boat, despite his sister's protests, and is never seen again.

Oscar Martin's story is a mystery, a beginning without an end, until one hundred years later when his great-niece Lucy Martin discovers Oscar's notebooks and decides to find out what happened to him. And that is where Kladstrup's novel, The Book of Story Beginnings, begins.

Unwittingly, Lucy uses the notebook of story beginnings in the same way as Oscar. They both wish to change a bad situation. Lucy's father, recently fired from his position as a chemistry professor, wants to take a break before looking for a new job. Her mother, a former-writer turned editor, is constantly worried about money. They argue. Lucy begins a story in the notebook: There once was a girl whose father was a magician.

The Book of Story Beginnings is the kind of fantasy adventure tale that all can enjoy, not just fans of fantasy, and certainly not just children. As with any successful fantasy, it is the characters which stand forefront and not necessarily the fantastical aspects. The primary magical element--a notebook in which the beginning of stories written become true--is used in the same way by both Oscar and Lucy, as an escape from the uneasiness they feel when their parents argue. The result is their subsequent struggles to fix the mess in which they've put themselves.

Their adventure contains the kinds of characters you'd expect in a story-come-to-life: kings and queens, orphans and pirates, villains and heroes. More than one story is begun in the magical notebook, and as these stories connect in satisfying ways, they are all brought to agreeable conclusions. But it's the main story, the one Oscar began all those years ago, that does not end so happily-ever-after, and it is this story's ending that brings Kladstrup's novel ahead of the formula children's tales and into the class of well-written novels for any age.