Oh, the joys of destruction!

I would have LOVED this book if it had been around when I was in middle school. I was one of those thirteen-year-olds who was really into guided journaling (and unguided journaling, too, but I found that sometimes a little structure really got the creative juices flowing), and this book takes that concept to a whole new level. It’s not even really journaling, honestly. It’s more like guided mayhem. Which might be even better.

If you tried to make Wreck This Journal into an ebook, it’d be the last time you used your ereading device. Because, at least as far as I know, there is no ereader that can survive being chewed on, scribbled on, scratched, dropped from great heights, or used as a surface on which to collect dead bugs. And that’s just a fraction of what you get to do to this thing. Jump on it. Bring it in the shower with you. Tie a string to it and drag it along on a walk. Tear out pages and give them away, or lose them. Turn them into balls, funnels, paper airplanes, paper chains.

In other words, give in to your destructive impulses and watch them turn into creative ones.

Castle, captured.

I suppose it might be a bit of a stretch to call the ramshackle English castle in this book a house, but for Cassandra Mortmain, our seventeen-year-old narrator, the castle is her house and she loves it, hates it, mocks it, and cherishes it in that familiar, frustrating relationship so many of us have with our homes.

And anyway, the castle in I Capture the Castle isn’t quite what you’d imagine. Sure, it has high stone walls and turrets and a gatehouse and a moat. But the Mortmain family is dirt-poor and so it’s also virtually unfurnished, frigid most all year round, and crumbling to pieces. Not a particularly easy or glamorous life, perhaps, but certainly one that provides some good material.

So, hoping to practice both her speed-writing and her narrative skills, Cassandra starts a journal in which she plans to “capture” her home and family through zealous scribbling. This ends up being a bit more complicated than she’d bargained for because life tends to resist being pinned down. On the bright side, however, the more challenging it is for her, the more interesting it is for us.

I Capture the Castle is a pretty old book (it was published in 1948) and very few of us can claim an adolescence anything like Cassandra’s, but it doesn’t feel dated or distant. On the contrary, her genuine and eloquent narration lend a charged immediacy to her surroundings that’s still palpable now, more than sixty years later.