Professor William Waterman Sherman has taught math at a boys' school in San Francisco for forty years. Given that this is his background, his dream in retirement -- to spend an entire year living in blissful solitude on a carefully constructed hydrogen-filled balloon, without ever touching down -- is eminently understandable.
It also, sadly for Professor Sherman, is a dream easily disrupted by a suitably uncooperative seagull. A hole in the balloon the size of said seagull leads him to come down on the island of Krakatoa. The island is supposedly uninhabited, but turns out to host a secret group of San Franciscan exiles, who have stumbled upon the diamond mine to end all diamond mines.
Most of the remainder of the plot of The Twenty-One Balloons, which won William Pène du Bois the 1948 Newbery Medal, consists of the good Professor learning about the society of the Krakatoan residents. Their fabulous diamond-given wealth has allowed them to stealthily import materials for opulent houses, each in the style of a different country. We learn about their form of government (which is, somehow, based on restaurants), their unusual names (each family is assigned a letter of the alphabet, which leads to the book's best joke), and their futuristic inventions (the bedsheet roll works much better than the electrified bumper car-style furniture). However, readers can put the year in which the book is set (1883) together with the location of Krakatoa, and guess that this society may be running on borrowed time.
All of this is narrated by Professor Sherman himself, in a frame story that involves his rescue, and his ensuing lecture before the Western American Explorers' Club. The novel owes a huge debt to Jules Verne (who is name-checked in the book), and a fair amount to Hugh Lofting, Mary Norton, and other authors in the "fantastic adventure" genre that was popular in the first half of the 20th century. The way in which The Twenty-One Balloons stands out may be in the narrowness of its focus. Unlike most of the other books in this style, it's not episodic -- despite traveling around the world, the Professor only visits the one exotic locale. Most similar titles also include at least one child as a traveling companion for the adult adventurer, but Professor Sherman emphatically does not. Now that I think about it, I believe there are only two children in the book who even have speaking lines, and neither of them emerge as a distinct character.
If I'd read The Twenty-One Balloons as a child, I'm pretty sure I would have thrilled to it, in much the same way that I did to Pippi Longstocking and The Mysterious Flight to the Mushroom Planet. As an adult, I found it quaint, but -- except for a paragraph featuring a Native American chief, and a handful of the kind of offhand remarks about "natives" that are nearly impossible to avoid in books of this vintage -- generally inoffensive, and sometimes charming.
Pène du Bois illustrated The Twenty-One Balloons, and was well-enough regarded as an illustrator to make him one of a handful of people to figure in both Newbery and Caldecott history -- he took two Caldecott Honors, for Bear Party in 1952, and Lion in 1957. His 1948 Newbery win came in a year that featured an embarrassment of riches. Five Honor books were named, including one that's likely better known these days, Misty of Chincoteague, by Marguerite Henry. Other well-known books from that year include Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, as well as a whole bevy of classic picture books: Goodnight Moon, It Looked Like Spilt Milk, Stone Soup, and White Snow, Bright Snow (which won the Caldecott). But, in its hydrogen-powered glory, The Twenty-One Balloons soared over all of them to take the gold medal.
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