Overhead doors

[asakiyume]

A truck was pulled up in a driveway in my neighborhood. It said "Devine Overhead Doors." (Here's a photo from the company's website, if you'd like to know precisely what it looked like.) Now, it seems that "overhead door" means a garage door that rolls up, but my thoughts went like this:

Devine Divine Overhead Doors



It reminds me of one of the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu, where angels poke their heads out of windows in the sky.

In very slightly tangential news, I gave up on Every Heart a Doorway, not for any flaw on its part, but because I realized--belatedly--that I don't like sucking all portal experiences into one framework.

Comments

[sovay]

And not just Dorothy and her family, but the other visitors, like Trot and Betsy Bobbin and Button Bright and the Shaggy Man.

Good point! There is a lot of traffic between Earth and Oz.

[asakiyume]

Every Heart a Doorway isn't using actual our-world fantasy story characters, though, so it's possible it just doesn't acknowledge that in some cases people get to stay in the other world. I suppose even if it does, that fact just serves to embitter the kids for whom that's not possible /supposition.

It's looking more and more like I should either quickly skim the rest of the story or else just talk hypothetically, rather than in reference to the novella.

[sovay]

It's looking more and more like I should either quickly skim the rest of the story or else just talk hypothetically, rather than in reference to the novella.

That's fair. I don't want to put you in the position of arguing either for or against something you have not read!

[selidor]

The rest of the novella does in fact address all these concerns: examining returning and its possibility (and happening) motivates all the plot. I totally empathize if it didn't pull you in enough to stay with though asakiyume :)

[asakiyume]

I'm just being a fussy reader! And I really, really dislike cutesy whimsy. But what you say in the other comment makes me think maybe I should give the book more of a chance.

[marycatelli]

That was, however, not his original conception. He had to go on write Oz books because nothing else pulled in the money. One notes he manages to introduce major inconsistencies between even the first and the second book.

[asakiyume]

*nodding* --but speaking as someone who was an enthusiastic Oz reader as a kid, those things don't necessarily intrude.

... I guess, though, we could look at how he wrapped things up at the end of the first book to see how he planned for a one-off portal fantasy to end. I seem to recall Dorothy's contented with being back home.

[marycatelli]

Oh, yes. In the book she wants to go home from the get-go, and never wavers. Learning this was something the movie tacked on. (And didn't integrate. For instance, why was she going to see the wizard if not to go home? Why not just stay put? Or have adventures?)

[sovay]

One notes he manages to introduce major inconsistencies between even the first and the second book.

Agreed, but however reluctantly he took to it, it is part of the original Baum canon, not even a Ruth Plumly Thompson addition, and therefore I think fair game for being acknowledged by any engagement with the trope.

[marycatelli]

It does complicate the treatment of it.