[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.]

In 2005, fifteen years after penning the fifth Vesper Holly book, Lloyd Alexander concluded the series with The Xanadu Adventure. Vesper’s first-generation fans were grown by then, many with kids of their own, but Alexander gave them a book that respects their maturity—a book that, like the 2002 novel The Rope Trick, is friendly to children but feels written for wistful adults.

Although fifteen years passed in the real world, Alexander starts The Xanadu Adventure just months after The Philadelphia Adventure. It’s still 1876, and our narrator, Professor Brinton Garrett, remains vexed by a cloying houseguest, the rambunctious young scholar he nicknames “The Weed.” Readers of the Vesper Holly books long ago learned not to trust their well-meaning but stuffy narrator, but Alexander implies far more than familiar humor when “Brinnie” fails to apprehend the way 20-year-old Vesper beams at the boy.

At first, no crisis drives The Xanadu Adventure. The whole gang—Vesper, The Weed, Brinton Garrett, and the professor’s wife, Mary—sail to the Mediterranean to indulge their various interests: Minoan inscriptions, Etruscan history, sightseeing in Turkey and Greece. Unsurprisingly, the Rasputin of this series, Dr. Desmond Helvetius, resurfaces, undiminished in his ruthlessness. As one of Vesper’s new friends, a Romanian archaeologist, exclaims: “He assaulted me! With a violence I thought existed only in the realms of higher education.”

Although Helvetius isn’t a substantive character even after six books, his schemes grow ever funnier. From his newly constructed Xanadu in Asia Minor, he plots to usurp the Ottoman Empire and monopolize the world petroleum supply to build a terrible new explosive, the humbly named “Helvolene.” He’s also keen to discredit Heinrich Schliemann‘s claim to unearthing “Troy”—and, in his most dastardly plan of all, he intends to sit down and compose a proper ending to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” (“I could not allow this to pass unchallenged,” insists Brinnie Garrett, outraged.)

Throughout The Xanadu Adventure, Alexander foregrounds this sort of eye-twinkling wit. As our heroes escape Xanadu through an air duct, Brinnie and Vesper share what could be their final moments. Their exchange is the banter of dear friends:

“Dear girl,” I said, as Vesper prepared for her turn, “should aught go amiss, if we are doomed to fail, one day we all shall meet in a brighter, happier place.”

“Philadelphia?” she said.

Alexander wrote only one more novel after The Xanadu Adventure, and this final Vesper Holly book, with its wistful dedication—”for adventurers, home at last”—is steeped with a pensive sense of endings. Without spoiling the book, I’ll say only that at 81, Alexander lends a very convincing voice to an aging narrator who helplessly watches his beloved ward become an adult and move on with her life.

The Xanadu Adventure abounds with references to classical literature and Shakespeare that promise a celebratory, comic ending, but misleadingly; this is still, in part, a novel about aging by an old man who survived war and mourned the loss of loved ones. One Amazon reviewer gripes that at the end of this book, Vesper Holly’s life suddenly moves at breakneck speed, without discussion or reflection, but perhaps that’s how the world seemed to an elderly Lloyd Alexander. I suspect he came back to the Vesper Holly series not only to conclude it, but also to point out that genuine endings are bittersweet in ways that children may yet comprehend.

[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.]

From 1986 to 1990, Lloyd Alexander published five Vesper Holly novels. While he clearly loved writing these slender adventures about an absurdly brilliant teenage polymath from 1870s Philadelphia, the third and fourth books fell back too easily on the formula established in the first, with an infallible heroine battling her nemesis in a world without any true danger. Fortunately, in the fifth book, The Philadelphia Adventure, Alexander tweaks the premise: Instead of sending Vesper and her guardian abroad to unravel the plots of the evil Dr. Helvetius, he sees fit to lure the villain to Vesper’s—and his own—hometown. 

“For these past few years, Miss Vesper Holly has adventured in imaginary places that seem real,” Alexander writes in an author’s note. “Now she adventures in a real place that seems imaginary, even fantastic.” With its cutthroat sailors, irritable Quakers, and disgruntled Civil War vets, Philadelphia is a worthy setting for a Vesper Holly adventure, even if Alexander embellishes his beloved city. Recalling his childhood perceptions of the Philadelphia suburbs, he turns Aronimink into an impenetrable wilderness, Kellytown into a pirate haven, and his own Drexel Hill into a jungle:

[By] late afternoon, we plunged into the harsh embrace of the Drexel Hills.

Our majestic Alleghenies may surpass the Drexel Hills in altitude, but not in spitefulness. For that, they can only be compared to the ghastly Haggar Mountains of Jedera. Most of the Haggar is bleakly devoid of life. In the Drexel Hills, there is entirely too much of it, mainly in the form of malicious biting and stinging insects, including an especially savage wood louse, unique to the area, almost as big as my thumbnail. Even the bramble bushes and wild barberry seemed possessed of malevolent lives of their own, plucking at us with their sharp talons. We were in constant danger of twisting our ankles on stones thrusting up like dragon’s teeth. Garter snakes the size of young anacondas slithered across our path…

Alexander’s Philadelphian grotesque, while funny, also strikes a necessary note of tension. When Vesper Holly and Dr. Helvetius finally come to blows, their fistfight on the banks of the Schuylkill recalls Moriarity and Sherlock Holmes—and the adult reader begins to wonder if death, in one of its innumerable forms, looms over this series at last.

Naturally, The Philadelphia Adventure has a wild Vesper Holly plot: President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil implore Vesper to ransom two royal Brazilian toddlers while saving the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition from the sabotage of Dr. Helvetius, who plans to use George Henry Corliss’s steam engine to blow up Grant, his Cabinet, and the Brazilian imperial family so he can install a puppet leader in America and raise a Brazilian-American empire from the chaos. All of this unfolds as a Vesper Holly book must, with demonstrations of language skills, displays of expert horsemanship, affirmation of scientific wisdom, and the musings of an affably fallible narrator, Dr. Brinnie Garrett, who seems surprised when decency wins in the end.

Of course, how a Vesper Holly book ends is less important than the gentle didacticism that drives each adventure to its closing page. The Philadelphia Adventure offers a quick snapshot of the troubled Grant Administration; it brings readers to the 1876 Expo; it shows Brinnie Garrett taking pride in the Etruscan history he never quite finishes, and a scholar nicknamed “The Weed” exploring yoga and Minoan inscriptions; and it introduces readers to Browning’s “How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix,” Whittier’s “Centennial Hymn” (which Brinnie mishears as “bloodcurdling shrieks and dreadful wailing”), and Wagner’s “Grand Centennial March.” Meanwhile, Vesper’s carriage horses are named Horsa and Hengist. At one point, Max Schmidt rows by, straight out of Eakins.

I could gripe that after five books, the Vesper Holly cast, never very substantive, still seems slight, but The Philadelphia Adventure is a lively read, all the more so because it reinvigorates the series; without scolding us to eat our peas, Alexander makes clear that science, literature, history, and music can be sources of pleasure and joy. The romp wrapped around that message lets young readers know that success begins with cultural and scientific knowledge properly applied and buttressed by human decency—a formula Alexander might properly credit to brotherly love.