Fabylon Appears On My Hill
Over the Hills to Fabylon by Nicholas Stuart Gray
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Certain books stick in your head, even if the memory of actual characters and plot fade. The title of this book stuck in mine for decades. Possibly because it refers to the "great spell" inherited by every king of Fabylon, the ability to jump the city over the hills to avoid invasion. The current king, being a nervous man, tends to spring the spell just whenever he's upset. So everyone tries to maintain calm, which is difficult to do with two princes and a princess in the family. Like other fairytale royals, they tumble into a variety of odd adventures as does their friend Corrie, who has a horse named Cobweb and an enchanted dog named Wanda following him about. If all of this is starting to ring vague bells in your memory, then you also encountered Fabylon in your public library as a small child and checked it out multiple times.
If you are foolish enough to go searching for Fabylon, I wish you luck. The book is rarely encountered in the wilds of used bookstore shelves or even in the vastness of Internet book listings. There were three editions published in the 20th century, starting in 1954 by Oxford Press. However the printings must have been small and seem to have been sold mainly to the library and school market. I don't remember the cover illustration for the 1968 Dobson (i.e. the cover shown on Goodreads) so I probably read the 1970 Hawthorn edition (American edition). If you dive deep into the Internet, you'll find various requests to reprint the book from sad people realizing the even tattered ex-library copies are going for phenomenal prices. Hopefully some publisher will do this some day. I'm adding my vote here.
However, for myself, I finally found a copy offered by my favorite UK bookdealer. It is the third time that I've ordered the book in the last 15 years--the other two times (from different sources), either the wrong book was shipped (and refunded) or I was informed that the book sold before I clicked (aargh). So being informed this time that I had clicked in time, all was good, and the book shipped, I still didn't believe that I would have a copy until it dropped into my mailbox.
However it did arrive on a Monday to start the week, a remarkably clean ex-library copy of the 1968 Dobson edition. I sat down to read it with some trepidation. Would it be any good? Was my memory deceiving me? No, it's quite wonderful with a sly humor that winks at both the children and the adults in the room. It definitely belongs in my bookcase with Once On A Time by A. A. Milne and Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell. It's not as absolutely fabulous as Once On A Time (which has the greatest villainess of them all) nor is it as twee as Shadow Castle (which is the most read review that I've ever posted on Goodreads). Fabylon nestles nicely between them for when I want to go adventuring back into childhood dreams. To paraphrase the wonderful first line of the novel, it is not a magical book, but it is a book with magic in it.
View all my Goodreads reviews
My Fabylon, which just arrived from the UK in lovely condition.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Certain books stick in your head, even if the memory of actual characters and plot fade. The title of this book stuck in mine for decades. Possibly because it refers to the "great spell" inherited by every king of Fabylon, the ability to jump the city over the hills to avoid invasion. The current king, being a nervous man, tends to spring the spell just whenever he's upset. So everyone tries to maintain calm, which is difficult to do with two princes and a princess in the family. Like other fairytale royals, they tumble into a variety of odd adventures as does their friend Corrie, who has a horse named Cobweb and an enchanted dog named Wanda following him about. If all of this is starting to ring vague bells in your memory, then you also encountered Fabylon in your public library as a small child and checked it out multiple times.
If you are foolish enough to go searching for Fabylon, I wish you luck. The book is rarely encountered in the wilds of used bookstore shelves or even in the vastness of Internet book listings. There were three editions published in the 20th century, starting in 1954 by Oxford Press. However the printings must have been small and seem to have been sold mainly to the library and school market. I don't remember the cover illustration for the 1968 Dobson (i.e. the cover shown on Goodreads) so I probably read the 1970 Hawthorn edition (American edition). If you dive deep into the Internet, you'll find various requests to reprint the book from sad people realizing the even tattered ex-library copies are going for phenomenal prices. Hopefully some publisher will do this some day. I'm adding my vote here.
However, for myself, I finally found a copy offered by my favorite UK bookdealer. It is the third time that I've ordered the book in the last 15 years--the other two times (from different sources), either the wrong book was shipped (and refunded) or I was informed that the book sold before I clicked (aargh). So being informed this time that I had clicked in time, all was good, and the book shipped, I still didn't believe that I would have a copy until it dropped into my mailbox.
However it did arrive on a Monday to start the week, a remarkably clean ex-library copy of the 1968 Dobson edition. I sat down to read it with some trepidation. Would it be any good? Was my memory deceiving me? No, it's quite wonderful with a sly humor that winks at both the children and the adults in the room. It definitely belongs in my bookcase with Once On A Time by A. A. Milne and Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell. It's not as absolutely fabulous as Once On A Time (which has the greatest villainess of them all) nor is it as twee as Shadow Castle (which is the most read review that I've ever posted on Goodreads). Fabylon nestles nicely between them for when I want to go adventuring back into childhood dreams. To paraphrase the wonderful first line of the novel, it is not a magical book, but it is a book with magic in it.
View all my Goodreads reviews
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