Kaleidoscope

The book opens with a brief scene in which one person instructs another to look through a kaleidoscope, a tube containing mirrors and colored glass that fracture and rearrange the world into shifting patterns. What follows is a series of interconnected, standalone stories organized into three parts: "Morning," "Afternoon," and "Evening." Each story is told by a different unnamed first-person narrator, and every story features a character or figure named James. Recurring motifs, including gardens, butterflies, apples, keys, shipwrecks, trees, angels, fire, and grief, shift across the stories like fragments turning inside a kaleidoscope.

In "A Trip to the Moon," a narrator steals a ship on his thirteenth birthday and sails with his friend James into the ocean. A storm lifts them to the moon, where a King enlists them to fight a war against the Sun, which seeks to abolish darkness, sleep, and dreams. After five hundred years of battle, James discovers that shadows can defeat the light soldiers and accepts the King's throne. The narrator returns to Earth, where only days have passed, insisting to James's grief-stricken mother that her son is safe, keeping the universe safe for dreaming.

The stories that follow vary widely in setting and voice. In "The Giant," a lonely giant forbidden from speaking to humans watches a small boy by a river, and the two develop a wordless friendship through gifts and stories read aloud. "The Library" features a winged being exiled to an island who rescues a shipwrecked boy and offers him a vast, disorganized library containing the story of everything that has happened and will happen. In "The Genie of the Cave," a rational narrator follows a barefoot boy deep into a seaside cave, where thoughts and memories drain away in the darkness until only the connection of their clasped hands exists.

"The Ice" is narrated by a tiny handmade figure that James created and slipped into his distant Father's coat pocket, with a folded note sewn into the figure's jacket. The ship becomes trapped in Arctic ice, and the crew perish. Recovered 175 years later, the figure sits in a museum case, its note now blank, the only one who knows what James's message said. In "The Abandoned House," two boys explore a house overtaken by nature, where a hundred blue butterflies burst from a carved cabinet. "The Spirit Machine" is narrated by a dead person who reveals that a grieving builder's elaborate device for contacting the dead was unnecessary: The builder himself was the Spirit Machine, the thing tying the narrator to the world. In "The Quest," a knight arrives in a dead kingdom bearing a young tree. Over decades, the ruler and knight plant a forest and build a home, though the knight never promised to stay forever.

Part Two, "Afternoon," opens with "The Tunnel," in which the narrator travels to James's castle-like house after James's death and navigates a pitch-black underground passage by touch, pressing toward forgiveness. In "The Last Time It Happened," a narrator recounts four episodes of overwhelming perceptual experience, from stone vaults rippling like a living forest to becoming a bird in flight. At night, James whispers reassurance: "Yes," and "Yes," and "Yes," and "Yes." In "The Museum," a narrator on a class trip sneaks away and finds James beside a mummy's glass case. The narrator presses an ear to the glass, believing the mummy is breathing, when James reveals himself on the other side and speculates that if the living can dream the dead back to life, the dead might dream about the living.

"The Story of Mr. Gardner" recounts a neighbor who spent over twenty years trying to define the word "apple" for a reference book dedicated to his late wife, producing seventy-five thousand pages without finishing. After boys set the house on fire, the narrator and James collect charred fragments. James places his hand on the pile and says, "The entire universe can be found inside an apple" (96). Other stories include "The Lightning-Struck Tree," in which a narrator and a boy discover a burning tree in a secret garden matching the narrator's dream; "The Funeral," in which a child buries household objects that once embodied an imaginary friend named James; "The Glass Shipwreck," in which touching a miniature shadow box transports two boys into a nested story of stolen jewels and catastrophe; and "The Sphinx," in which two classmates travel to the California dunes to find a Sphinx left from a silent film and lie inside its wooden frame, talking about the gods.

Part Three, "Evening," opens with "The Book of Dreams," in which James invents written instructions for banishing nightmares. The method works, and the narrator no longer needs the paper but misses James's handwriting. In "The Mysteries," two boys fill notebooks about ghosts and monsters, hiding them beneath a floorboard secured by an imaginary lock and a real silver key. When James loses the key, neither boy simply lifts the board, honoring their promise. After James dies, the narrator hears James's voice say, "Open your hand" (141), and unclenches a fist to find the key. "Chrysalis" finds James explaining that inside a chrysalis, a caterpillar dissolves entirely into liquid, from which the butterfly grows, with only its memories surviving. When the narrator opens his eyes, James is gone.

In "The Lights," a boy new to town witnesses mysterious lights in a forest and whispers James's name as a local boy grabs his hand. "In the Dark" finds a narrator wrestling all night with an unseen force that proves to be a tiny bat, which says, "I've been trying to tell you I love you" (162) before vanishing. In "The Garden," a dragon offers the narrator an apple containing all knowledge, but total knowledge would eliminate mystery. The narrator notices the dragon shrugs exactly the way James does, then calls for James and receives no answer. "A Memory" recalls meeting James in first grade, building a miniature city of twigs, and holding hands in the school auditorium. The narrator alone knows the principal is about to announce James's death, slips out, and watches a tree planted in James's memory. When boys later set James's family's abandoned house on fire, sparks rise momentarily indistinguishable from the stars, but the embers fall or go out while the stars remain undimmed.

The final story, "The Mind of God," places the narrator aboard a spaceship on a multigenerational expedition. The narrator reads books James gave him and imagines James, long since turned to dust, catching a ride into space. In bed, the narrator wonders whether the distance between seconds is as vast as the distance between stars, and whether this is what it feels like to be inside the mind of God, where past and future mean nothing, and the time is always now.