[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

During an early scene in The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen, a palace servant gently mocks his sovereign lord. “Ignorance is a common ailment,” he says. “In time, it goes away. Unless it proves fatal.” His remark sets the tone of this strange and intriguing book, which is one of Lloyd Alexander’s more haunting novels, if hardly his most cheerful.

When the elderly emperor of T’ang is too frail to travel northward to study another kingdom’s system of perfect justice, his son, Jen, offers to go on his behalf. Decent but naive, Jen leaves the confines of the palace and is shocked by the harsh world beyond. Distracted from his journey, the young prince falls in love, faces murderers, is reduced to begging, and comes to understand how his decisions echo in the lives of friends and strangers alike.

Promises kept, traumas overcome, lessons learned, generosity rewarded—Lloyd Alexander’s foray into quasi-Chinese myth dwells on many of his usual themes, but The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen sparkles with eerie details: a general who stays conscious even as he turns to stone; an artist who literally gets lost in his own painting; and a catatonic child who sails through the clouds on a kite. The villain, too, is no cackling caricature but a mass murderer whose whispering sword begs to drink the blood of its victims. Full of roving mystics and fickle magic, Alexander’s mythologized China is weird and unnerving. As lost as Prince Jen, the reader discovers the workings of the novel’s moral universe only gradually, each time Jen and his companions stumble, suffer, and fail.

In 1991, after writing five Vesper Holly novels, Lloyd Alexander was clearly eager to try something different. The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen opened the final phase of his career, a mature, sixteen-year period marked by experiments with light comic fare, literary autobiography, and clever musings on the art of storytelling. With its depictions of human cruelty, including a good prince condemned by a corrupt magistrate and left to scavenge like an animal, The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen especially resembles The Rope Trick, in which even decency and good humor fail to leaven the sadness of the world. Jen’s journey ends well, but its lesson is somber: that we earn adult wisdom only through hardship, injustice, and fear.

[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

Lloyd Alexander got tremendous mileage out of felines. Between 1956 and 1973, four of his books—My Five Tigers, Park Avenue Vet, Time Cat, and The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man—were testaments to his adult-onset affection for the common house cat. Published in 1977, The Town Cats and Other Tales is a fitting coda to Alexander’s decades of cat-fancying, offering eight concise stories about cats and the foolish humans who are better off for having known them.

The logic of the tales in The Town Cats is unusual but internally consistent. All of the cats talk, and most of them easily assume human roles or trade places with people, largely for comic effect. Most amusing to an adult reader is Alexander’s gentle but persistently disdainful depictions of people who govern: a bureaucrat who threatens to impose taxes and conscription on a provincial town; a king who makes his personal preferences the law of the land; a sultan who forbids anyone to tell him “no”; and a group of city fathers who argue about which of their names will adorn public works. Naturally, cats humble them all. At the same time, the cats in these stories help the poor, reward the honest, and teach hard lessons to the nouveau riche.

Published during the period between the Prydain series and the Westmark books, The Town Cats offers nothing new for Lloyd Alexander readers, but that’s the judgment of an adult sensibility—or, more specifically, of an adult who’s familiar with Alexander’s later, more mature writing. Although the final chapter, the story of a cat trying to choose a career path, is unsubtle and kind of corny, most of the tales in The Town Cats are clever fables set in fantasy versions of recognizable places, from 17th-century Holland to the bustling cities of the Middle East. For kids, the book promises a world tour and a fine introduction to the art of the short story. For adults—well, all I can say is that if you take no pleasure in watching a talking cat outwit a cheating sultan at chess, you surely have a heart of stone.

[Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of reviews of all of Lloyd Alexander’s non-Prydain books. To see all posts in this series, click on the “Lloyd Alexander” tag.]

Yes, that’s the cover of The El Dorado Adventure. Yes, the girl behind the counter at the bookstore gave me a suspicious look when I bought it. That didn’t bother me; what did worry me was that the Vesper Holly adventures would be a chore to read. I was wrong. Published in 1987, this second of six books about the 19th-century teenage adventurer and polymath is a hoot—and further proof of Lloyd Alexander’s knack for writing pure, lighthearted action.

When the wealthy, orphaned Vesper receives a mysterious telegram about some volcano-festooned real estate she inherited from her parents, she puts aside her banjo and her experiments in fractionating hydrocarbons and sails with her bumbling guardian from Philadelphia to El Dorado, “one of a tumble of countries crowding the neck of land between North and South America.” Upon her arrival, she battles a slippery French engineer who plans to build a canal that will flood the last surviving village of the Chiricas, the only local tribe to hold off the Conquistadors. During her stay in El Dorado, Vesper also breaks out of several prisons, repairs a riverboat engine, brings about gender equity among the Chiricas, burns down an opera house, quotes Rousseau and Alfred de Musset from memory, and arranges for the eruption of a dormant volcano—all without the benefit of a formal education.

Of course, Vesper’s preposterous competence is half the fun of the Vesper Holly Adventures; the stuffy narrative voice of her guardian, Dr. Brinton “Brinnie” Garrett, is the other half. Educated but largely uncreative, Brinnie is the classic unreliable narrator, but he never becomes a buffoon, and his Victorian decency is frequently comic. When the evil Dr. Helvitius—Vesper’s nemesis from The Illyrian Adventure and Moriarity to her Holmes—resurfaces in El Dorado, Brinnie is livid. “The fellow is a disgrace to the academic profession,” he huffs, even as he backslides into good-hearted optimism: “Perhaps, I suggested, he might still retain some spark of human decency. He was, I reminder her, an opera lover.”

When Vesper dissuades the Chiricas from initiating a hopeless armed rebellion that would surely cause their extinction, and when Brinnie contemplates pulling the trigger when an evil man lands in his rifle sights, Alexander comes close to reexamining some of his favorite moral questions—but then something blows up, or our heroes get captured, or a new friend or foe emerges from the steamy jungle. I’ve said before that novelists could learn much about lively, concise storytelling from Lloyd Alexander, but the Vesper Holly books—marketed to girls but with something for everyone, even grown-ups—are especially entertaining because they’re such a rarity: short, breezy adventures by an author who’s having the time of his life.