A Soaring Imagination

This spring my five-year-old son was just beginning to enjoy having chapter books read to him, and I scanned my children's book collection looking for titles that would appeal to him. He's a fanatic about flight of all kinds, so when my eye lit on "The Twenty-One Balloons" I knew we'd have a hit. Little did I know how big that hit would be.

"The Twenty-One Balloons" details the fantastic adventures of Professor William Waterman Sherman, a Victorian schoolteacher who upon his retirement decides to build a huge balloon and fly around the world for a year. Leaving San Francisco in August of 1883, he heads west over the Pacific...and a few weeks later is picked up by a freighter in the Atlantic, amid the wreckage of not one but twenty balloons. The explanation for this amazing feat, naturally, captures the imagination of the world--and of Pene du Bois's readers.

Within five days of our first picking up "The Twenty-One Balloons," my son had demanded it be read to him all the way through not once but twice--once by my husband and once by me. A true technophile, he was entranced by the level of detail surrounding Professor Sherman's adventures: how his balloon was constructed, his flight plan, and the descriptions of numerous amazing inventions Professor Sherman encounters. The precise line drawings Pene du Bois illustrated his book with perfectly capture the spirit of these technical marvels. (When I found the unabridged audio version of this book at the local library, I brought it home and had the pleasure of watching my son spend one entire rainy afternoon listening to the story--for the third time within a few weeks!--while following along in the book looking at the illustrations.)

The really magical thing about "The Twenty-One Balloons," as with all great children's books, is that adults will enjoy it as much as, if not more than, children. I don't want to give away too much, but Professor Sherman discovers an entirely new and unique civilization, raising all kinds of thought-provoking questions about what the best mode of government is, where the secret of happiness really lies--and what you would do if you discovered a huge diamond mine that nobody else in the world knew about...

We haven't had a chance to discuss these questions with our son yet--he's mostly fascinated by Professor Sherman's magical balloon trips--but I expect that as he grows our family will have many more encounters with "The Twenty-One Balloons," each one different from the last.