Books I Have Read - The Trouble with Wenlocks

I have just finished reading a little book titled 'The Trouble with Wenlocks a Stanley Wells Mystery" written by Joel Stewart.

It is strange little book with a strange story that turns out not to be so small but big, huge even. It is about a small boy named Stanley Wells who imagines everything and anything to the point were reality and imagination get lost.

He meets Dr E. B. Moon who is an unraveller of ravelled things. An untangler of the tangled. With his faithfully dog (I suppose you'd call him and by the way Dr Moon is NOT a person) the three of them try to solve the problem of the Wenlocks that keep eating the Sorrows (little furry creatures) that are hanging over everybodies heads.

Upon meeting Albert Lee, a man who lives on a river boat Stanley finds that his daughter Umiko is missing. She has been kidnapped by the Wenlocks.

The search begins to find Umiko and on the way people are found sitting, standing, laying down like zombies. Wenlocks are everywhere eating up the Sorrows that float over peoples heads and as the Sorrow is taken away the human becomes a zombie.

As the puzzle unfolds Umiko is found creating lots of little Sorrow creatures from her bad memories of her mother dieing of cancer when she was younger. She also created the Wenlocks to eat up the Sorrows to make people feel better. It is not until Stanley points out that we all need our sorrows to make us human that she makes them all go away except for one Sorrow, which she keeps for herself as she is not ready to give it up yet.

I found this story an amazing way of discussing the problem of sorrow, heartache and how people will try to get rid of it in anyway they can so they can feel better but in the end it doesn't work. People need their hate, their sorrow, their sadness to know what love, kindness, happiness is. We are all made up of the experiences we have had in the past and no matter how much we would like to get rid of the pain it is with us until the day we die. We just have to come to terms with it and change it into something positive or else it will eat us up like the Wenlocks.