Edward and Eleanor, brother and sister, live in a big old house in Concord, Massachusetts, with their Aunt Lily, a piano teacher, and their uncle Freddy, an addled literary scholar who deeply admires the Transcendentalists, especially “Waldo” Emerson and Henry Thoreau. The problem is a financial one: the bank is about to repossess and raze their home. This impending disaster sets Edward and Eleanor on a quest to find the hidden jewels and treasures that their long lost Uncle Ned And Aunt Nora may have received from an Indian prince, Krishna, and may have left behind when they disappeared as children. Clues in the form of a poem etched into an attic window guide Eddy and Eleanor to enter into dangerous adventures in the form of dreams that really happen, all to find enough treasure to save their home.

This book reminded me of Edward Eager’s books, Half Magic and others, and of Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays and Spiderweb for Two. The adventures of Eddy and Eleanor are both real and dreamlike, and the dreams are dreams with a meaning where the two children participate in a joint-dream but learn life lessons along the way. The dreams and the adventures are all intertwined with the writings and lives of Thoreau and Emerson and Louisa May Alcott as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell in a way that is child-friendly and yet speaks on a different level to adults, too.

For example, in one chapter’s dream Eleanor and Eddy travel through a mirror, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, and find themselves confronted with a long series of reflections of themselves stretching out to the left and to the right. The children must choose again and again which reflection to follow, and as they follow the sometimes more desirable but wrong path their choices narrow and narrow until the only reflection they can choose is a horrible, degraded and degenerate version of themselves. However, when they go back and choose the right path the land of reflections behind the mirror opens up into a multitude of wonderful choices of who each child could become.

Instead of two choices, there were many. They were unable to choose which was the best, so they picked one at random. And beyond that choice lay a hundred, and beyond the next a thousand. Just as the other maze had led them down a narrowing path until there was no choice left, this one opened out into wide and shining worlds of possibility.

And that scene in its turn reminds me of C.S. Lewis and The Great Divorce and Narnia and “further up and further in.” There’s another dream or vision that the children have at Christmas time of all of the light-bearers of history, from ancient times up through the present day, and one of them is Jesus, perhaps the brightest but only one of a multitude of greater and lesser “lights” who add to the accumulated light of the centuries. It’s not exactly right, but it’s close.

Anyway, I loved this book, and I’m pleased to see that there is are sequels, in fact eight books in all about the Hall family of Concord, Massachusetts, one of which is the Newbery Honor book The Fledgling. I’ve actually read The Fledgling a very long time ago, but all I remember is something about flying and perhaps geese? Anyway, The Diamond in the Window is the first book in the series (Hall Family Chronicles), and the second book, which I hope to read soon, is called The Swing in the Summerhouse. The other books are:

• The Astonishing Stereoscope
• The Fledgling
• The Fragile Flag
• The Time Bike
• The Mysterious CIrcus
• The Dragon Tree

I actually have The Fledgling and The Time Bike in my library. I purchased The Diamond in the Window from Purple House Press, so I have that, too. But it looks as if the others in the series are out of print, so I’ll have to find them used or from the public library if I want to continue reading about the Hall Family and their escapades.