★★★★☆ Plausibly deniable fantasy

The Pink Motel

Carol Ryrie Brink

Lately I have gotten out of the habit of rereading books. However, being reminded of The Pink Motel, I remembered that I was at one time very fond of this book, and I thought "Why not? I can reread it in an hour...". So I got myself a copy (paperback -- it's not available on kindle) and read it.

I grew up in a house full of books. Most of the books were randomly arranged on bookshelves throughout the house. (Since I knew intimately the contents of every bookshelf in the house, the lack of order didn't bother me.) However, old books would occasionally show up in corners and crannies. I think I was about 12 when I unexpectedly found The Pink Motel somewhere. (In other houses loose change might show up under the couch cushions -- in ours you were likely to find a lost book.) It was a faded pink hardback, probably a first edition that had found its way into our home from a school library that had deemed it surplus to needs. I had never heard of the author. (Carol Ryrie Brink is a name to conjure by in children's literature, but I didn't yet know that. The Pink Motel is one of Brink's later works, number 20 in Wikipedia's list -- she had long been a successful children's author when it was published.)

The Pink Motel is a stealth fantasy novel. You will not see its genre listed as fantasy, but that is what it is. It was obvious to me that Miss Ferry was a witch, with her remarks about the ogres and giants she knew in her youth many hundreds of years ago and her reference to the wand she had left at home. Of course, she dismissed these as jokes as soon as anyone noticed, but it was clear she did that to provide plausible deniability to comfort those who did not believe in the existence of witches. Since I, like all sensible people, knew that witches did indeed exist (as characters in books of fiction), I did not need this crutch and could confidently ignore her denials.

Miss Ferry is not the only fantastic character. In fact, outside the Mellen family, none of the characters in The Pink Motel seems like a person from The Real World. I remember being particularly entertained by the gangsters, who were funny and could not possibly be believed as Real World gangsters.

So that is The Pink Motel -- a charming and funny fantasy that pretends, implausibly, not to be a fantasy. Apparently the pretense is good enough to fool the publishers, the Library of Congress, and the people at Goodreads who classify books into genres.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

PS 16-Jul-2023: In working my way through The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, I found this surprising endorsement in the tribute by Gerald Hausman.

In writing this, I am suddenly reminded that I have left out the last and most eccentric of Roger's gift books. How did I miss The Pink Motel by Carol Ryrie Brink? Roger presented this skinny little novella to me one day.

Comments

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