What a sweet little mini series. As one who can barely wade through a Jane Austen novel, I’d much rather watch it on television and this version was completely delightful.
Amanda Price adores Pride and Prejudice to the point where she’d forgo a night with her long-term boyfriend to read the classic romance and dream of Mr. Darcy. One night, after an abysmal drunken marriage proposal goes awry, Amanda dives into her favourite tale again, only to be interrupted by Elizabeth Bennett herself, who has suddenly found herself floundering in Amanda’s bathtub. It turns out there’s a little door between our world and Elizabeth’s fictional one and she suggests they swap places for a while. Amanda thinks it’s all a bit of a joke at first, but when she cannot return and starts meeting all her favourite characters in the flesh, the desire to go home fades a little. At least until the story starts going horribly wrong…
I can think of so many books I’d love to fall into. There’s a series of novels and short stories by Charles De Lint that take place in a fictional town called Newford where buskers and artists rub elbows with Fair Folk and alternate realms and ghosts and paintings come to life. Every time I sit down with one of those books I wish I could be friends with everyone in them.
There are several titles by William Sleator that set my imagination on fire when I first read them. I’ll just highlight a couple.
The Boy Who Reversed Himself is about a girl who discovers a classmate holds the key to traveling between dimensions and cajoles him into showing her how it’s done. She only wants to learn so she can dazzle the boy she really likes, though, and is ill prepared for what they find once they get there, and what finds them. I used to imagine what it would be like to actually find a way in there myself.
In Interstellar Pig, a strange group of tourists arrive at the lake house Barney’s folks have rented for the season. They’re looking for the piece to an intergalactic war game that got dropped by a player a hundred years earlier (he used a time travel card). The three rivals have teamed up on Earth, but Barney is the one who finds the prize and winds up part of the game himself. I wanted that game so bad. I hoped someone somewhere would make a board game version, but no such luck. I see the rules are available if anyone wants to build one, though.
I can’t even get anyone to play Cripple Mr. Onion with me so I think I’ll pass.
One Minion's Opinion 