In a funny, bittersweet follow-up to the classic Gulliver's Travels, Sam Gayton imagines a return to Lilliput from the point of view of one of its citizens.
Gayton begins with a bang: the heroine, Lily, is out crabbing with two friends when one of them screams. She turns to see a giant rising from the sea, "climbing out of all the stories Nana told her at bedtime." The giant introduces himself as Lemuel Gulliver, kidnaps Lily and takes her back with him to London to live in a bird cage in the attic of a clockmaker's shop. Readers meet her in the midst of "Escape Plan Thirty-three." Each time Gulliver catches her in her efforts to flee, he places her in a smelly, flea-ridden sock. Then one day, due to an earlier escape attempt (a note fastened by a thread to a mouse's tail), Finn the clockmaker's apprentice comes to her rescue.
The author makes the most of the contrast in size between the diminutive Lily and the "Yahoos" (her name for the human giants, borrowed from Jonathan Swift's 18th-century novel) who run the world around her. Gayton imagines a Gulliver alone in the world, forced to return to Lilliput and bring back a Lilliputian in order to prove the tales in his Book of Travels. Gayton adds an original spin with his concept of time as the true enemy. For Lily, "one moon," or month, is equivalent to a year for a giant. She feels the pressure of the ever-ticking clock, and longs to see her Nana once more. Villainous Mr. Plinker's clock creations embody these ideas. In the orphanage where Finn grew up, Plinker's clock would "run fast when we ate our dinner, and slow when we sewed." The man's pièce de resistance is the "Waste-Not Watch," affixed to Finn's wrist; for every second Finn "wasted," the watch tightened. Lily "learned that the world was full of cages, and not all were built of iron."
Suspense mounts when Lily and Finn plot to steal the pages of Gulliver's book that describe Lilliput's location, and to free the Swift trapped inside Plinker's clock to fly her home. Readers get a rare view of London from the gutter up, with all its sights, smells and sounds, and artist Alice Ratterree captures the characters and their surroundings in impressive detail. An image of Lily inside Plinker's Astronomical Budgerigar, attempting to free Swift, is one of the book's highlights. Readers will hope for more from Sam Gayton and may well seek out Swift's classic after reading Lily's suspenseful, moving story. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness
Shelf Talker: British author Sam Gayton imagines a sequel to Gulliver's Travels in which Gulliver returns to Lilliput and kidnaps Lily, whose suspenseful story of attempting to escape fills these pages.