The Forgotten Door

The Forgotten Door - Alexander Key

By the author of 'Escape to Witch Mountain', 'The Forgotten Door' is something I stumbled across when looking for something I'd actually read when I was younger.

Jon has lost his memory. After a fall of some kind, he's woken up in unfamiliar woods and needs to find help to recover and make his way back home. But the people he's coming across are unusual, can't do the things that he can do, and find everything about him, from his appearance, and clothes, to the way that he talks, unusual, perhaps dangerous. The strange place he finds himself is called EARTH! Is he from another planet? The future?

Key raises many of the important issues of social science fiction - namely the need for compassion in confrontation of the unknown - in a way that young readers will comprehend. It's a simple story, some larger-than-life touches of government paranoia, with the villains being mostly unpleasant, greedy neighbors and the heroes a family. Everything is on an understandable scale.

If the book had any failings, it was the rushed ending and the inability of the author to come up with any other satisfactory conclusion than having the family trip off to wonderland with Jon as opposed to, I don't know, trying to make the world a better place?