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This is a post about two middle-grade books that came out in the early 1990s, just a bit too late for me to have run across them as a kid (I was a teenager at the time, and had started thinking of myself as “too old “ for this type of book). But I’ve found them now because a) I have a kid of my own, and b) I’m sufficiently old not to have any compunction about buying or reading children’s books for myself.




I discovered Goblins in the Castle because it showed up as a Yuletide fandom this past year. I initially got a copy for myself, and started reading it on a plane coming back from visiting family in January. S was in the seat next to me playing games on her tablet, but not far into the trip she looked over and asked what I was reading. I told her the name of the book, and explained that it was about an orphan boy called William, growing up in the mysterious Toad-in-a-Cage Castle… she immediately asked if I could read it to her. Now, there are very few examples of books I’ve chosen for myself that I would consider appropriate to read aloud to a first grader, but in this case it was perfect. I was a little worried that she might not quite be old enough to appreciate it, but in fact she loved it. We kept reading throughout most of the two hour flight, and finished the book with a few additional nights of bedtime reading back home. Both of us found it to be very readable and fun, with plenty of silly humor but also characters sufficiently well-developed and sympathetic to make us care about what happened to them.

There are a lot of classic fantasy tropes here. As mentioned, William is an orphan, or at least has no contact with or memory of his parents. He was abandoned at the Castle as an infant and taken in by the Baron, who pretty much ignored him thereafter, so that he was raised mostly by Hulda the housekeeper, Karl the librarian, and, in the early years, a nameless nanny who was eventually eaten by something nasty that lived in the castle moat. (We never find out how any of the servants ended up working in the castle; I enjoyed this Yuletide fic that fills in Karl’s backstory. ). Despite his very odd upbringing, William is a sweet and thoughtful kid. At the time our story begins, he is eleven years old, and spends much of his time exploring the castle on his own. In this way, he meets a number of additional, previously-unsuspected denizens of the castle: the creepy wizard Ishmael, the strange Igor (who enjoys bopping people on the head with his beloved teddy bear), and of course the titular goblins, who have long been imprisoned in one of the castle’s towers. One night, William finds himself freeing the goblins: a terrible mistake—or is it?

Spoilers:

William ends up leaving the castle for the first time in his life; he befriends Fauna, a local girl about his age. Refreshingly, there is not the slightest suggestion that their relationship is or will ever become a romance. He also encounters the powerfully magical Granny Pinchbottom, who apparently was counting on his freeing the goblins all along. It’s never clear (at least to me) how Granny was involved with William’s origins, but she plays the requisite fairy tale role of giving him some useful magic gifts and then abruptly disappearing. It emerges that freeing the goblins was actually a good thing. Granny explains that although the goblins made some mischief, when they were free “the world around here was more joyous, the people happier, the land more bountiful. When the goblins were locked away, when their wild energy was imprisoned, much of that went with them.” Coville reveals in his author’s note that he was a longtime elementary school teacher, and “freeing the goblins” hit me as a clear metaphor for giving free rein to the “wild energy” of children, letting them be loud and messy and creative.

There’s a sequel, Goblins on the Prowl, which I haven’t yet read, but definitely plan to share with S.





I hadn’t previously heard of Coville, but he’s apparently quite a prolific author. On looking him up, I came across Aliens Ate My Homework, which was an irresistible title. The hero of the story is sixth grader Rod Albright. The title, and the broad outlines of the plot, absolutely sound like something a sixth grader would come up with, but again the character work elevates it beyond that. Rod’s mom, for example, comes off as a real person rather than a generic Clueless Adult. She’s doing the best she can as a single parent to Rod and his three year old twin siblings—all we hear about their father is that he doesn’t live with them anymore. I appreciated that this fact was there in the background but didn’t become a major focus in a way that would make this a Problem Novel. (It does have a bit of plot relevance later—see below.)

Again, plenty of well-used Golden Age science fiction tropes show up. The aliens arrive in a silver flying-saucer-style ship; they have ray guns, tractor beams, and an expanding/shrinking ray—when we first meet them, they’re all about two inches tall courtesy of the shrinking ray. They come in search of an intergalactic criminal on behalf of the League of Worlds, which, naturally, humans are not invited to join on account of being Not Very Nice. There are some fun moments that deliberately call out science fiction cliches. My favorite: Rod is leading the aliens through a swamp to a secluded field where they can re-expand their ship, and one alien, Grakker, waxes nostalgic, saying that the swamp reminds him of home. Rod asks if Grakker comes from a swamp planet, to which Grakker snarkily responds, “Do you come from a swamp planet?” Take that, Star Wars planets with one-dimensional climates!

The aliens are a fairly diverse bunch, in terms of both species and gender—and speaking of that, Coville does a couple of things I really didn’t expect to see in a 90’s children’s book. First off, there’s a discussion about pronouns. The head diplomat, Madame Pong, introduces herself as a female of her species. For the others, Rod mostly defaults to ‘he,’ except in the case of an intelligent talking plant, Phillogenous esk Piemondum, whom Rod initially thinks of as ‘it,’ but quickly switches to ‘he’ on learning the nickname ‘Phil.’ Phil doesn’t object, so either this pronoun is accurate or Phil doesn’t want to make a thing about it. This is notable because someone else does want to make a thing about it. The turtle-headed, four-legged Tar Gibbons is neither male nor female, and politely requests the pronoun ‘it.’ [This choice is a little jarring, but it’s clearly more a case of linguistic flailing than any intention of disrespect. I think if the book had come out 20 years later it would have been ‘they.’]

Secondly: both Grakker and Flinge Iblick, known as Snout, are definitively identified as male per the pronoun discussion. The book never explicitly states that these two are married, or in a romantic relationship with each other, but they totally are. They share sleeping quarters on the spaceship, and they obviously care deeply about each other. There are several great hurt-comfort scenes between them, with each one getting a chance to provide comfort to the other. I’m really impressed that a middle-grade book from 1993 got away with this.

S and I both found this to be a lot of fun, and I was pleased to find that there are three more books in the series.

Vaguely spoilery stuff regarding Rod’s father:

the intergalactic villain, BKR, at one point tries to bribe Rod with the promise of information about his father. I wondered if we were about to have a “Luke, I am your father” moment, or if we would find out that Rod’s father was missing due to some alien plot. This never came to anything, which was something of a relief. But I’m guessing we haven’t heard the last of this. When looking up the titles of the other books in the series, I learned that one of them is called (only in the UK–the US title is different for some reason) Aliens Took My Dad.