Book Review: The Silver Crown by Robert C. O'Brien

 

The Silver Crown
by
Robert C. O'Brien

This is a multiple re-read. As of September 2026 I've just finished it for probably the fourth or fifth time. I only entered the first and last dates tho as my memory is vague on the others. The first time was likely fall of 1969 but it could have been late spring of that year as it was a school library book and I spent part of the time reading it outside. So either end of fifth grade or beginning of sixth. Anyway it is one of a handful of books I read as a child that I keep getting drawn back to. I remember being so enthralled the first time that I was reading between my turns at a monopoly game and a chess or checkers game with my brother who was indignant with me. I'm in my late sixties now and I remain as enthralled as ever even though I know how it turns out I've put enough distance between reads that many twists still surprise me but even when they don't I still vibe to the story.

So the story: Ellen wakes on her tenth birthday to find a silver crown beside her. So as not to wake her still sleeping family she walks to a nearby park and sits on a log and puts it on and presides as queen over all the small critters. She hears sirens that stop nearby instead of fading away she walks toward the scene and overhears the firemen saying nobody could have survived that and then realizes it is her house and thus her parents and her brother and sister are dead. The fireman won't believe her when she says she lived there and tells her to run along. A policeman believes her and starts walking her toward the nearby police station but they witness a holdup on the way and the policeman must chase the criminal and she is alone again. She resolves to hitchhike to her aunt's home in Kentucky, a nearby state. Of course even at 11 I knew that was not going to go as planned. That was just the first morning.

Read on if spoilers do not concern you. To explain why this book still haunts me after more than fifty years I can't avoid them.

By the next morning she was lost in the woods still many miles from Aunt Sarah's. There was a mountain pass still between them and it wasn't safe to go back to the highway. She is found by a young boy, Otto, with a talking crow named Richard. Otto takes her home to the log cabin where he's being raised by an elderly woman. When Richard, alerts them in the night that there are strangers about the woman scares them off with a shotgun blast over the tree tops. The next morning she sends Otto to escort Ellen across the pass on an old logging trail that will intersect with the road to Aunt Sarah's. It should be a three or four day walk. But over a week later they are still only half way because of setbacks and detours: they discover they are being followed by a evil looking man who was dressed all in black with green stripes like the holdup guy that first morning; a section of road along a cliff that broke away; a deep crevasse that cuts across their path; Ellen's sprained ankle; running out of food so Otto needs to hunt and trap.

Otto returns one day to the cave where Ellen is nursing her ankle with news of a mysteries black tower surrounded with a high chain fence with children dressed in black marching on black paths looking neither left or right. Otto wants to climb the fence to look for food but Ellen discourages him. The next day he doesn't return at all. Soon as she is able Ellen sets out to find that tower and when she does manages to sneak in with a transport of children being delivered. Inside she discovers that it's a school teaching mean-spirited, criminal and destructive behaviors with the aid of twisted 'Aesop's Fables' and every child and adult acts like they are in some kind of trance.

Ellen discovers she is unaffected by whatever has the rest in thrall. She tries to pretend but that doesn't work for long and she is locked in a room and tests are run to find out why she is not 'in tune'. Then she is sent to meet the King who is wearing a crown identical to hers but pure black. The King introduces her to the Hieronymus machine and it's four phase plan for world domination. She sees a phrase on it that says 'He who wears the black crown I rule. He who wears the Silver crown rules me.' The King then shows her a room where 24 men are busily building 24 new machines. He is attempting to get her on board in spite of her being out of tune by appealing to greed and desire for power or control. But during that interview she gives her self away by recognizing one of the men in black she'd encountered in her home town. The King stops being 'kind' and enthusiastic about the 'mission'. He demands she hand over the Silver crown. She declines. She is roughly returned to her cell.

There is still many twists and turns as there is still over 20% of the story left but I've shared enough now to make clear why this novel gripped me so for over five decades. It was my first encounter with two ideas that have become central to my research obsessions over the years and to the themes of many of my own stories: fascism or authoritarianism (the embodiment of the bully spirit) and story used as propaganda and mind control. Also the us vs. them dynamic that actively discourages empath. When I did my deep dive into the Holocaust and WWII when I was 16 I remembered The Silver Crown and realized it was a fable warning against such hunger for power and control. I'm pretty sure it was around then (between 1974-75) that I reread it. Another time was in the early 80s when I was thinking about reading it aloud to my niece but decided it was too mature for her.

I realized as I encountered the Hieronymus machine again that this was also the first time I'd been introduced to the concept of AI. But only be weeks or a few months since I was still 11 when I saw my first Star Trek episode.  That makes three themes that are as relevant today as they were in 1968 when it was published: lust for power; abuse of power; us vs them to short circuit empathy; story use as propaganda to shape reality and control minds; the risk of unleashing an unconstrained AI. Librarians and middle school teachers take note.

As a side note I find it interesting that this story resonated with me thirty years before I broke free of my own "Hieronymus machine' the funde cult I was raised in. How did I miss then what seems obvious parallels to me now? Mind control with dogma and use of story to define 'reality'.  Hierarchy that must not be questioned or disobeyed. Enforced conformity. Encouragement to do and say unkind things to those who stray from the 'right' path. This too is all in The Silver Crown.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Befriending Anger

Anger by Diana Ong

print for sale at art.com

Laurie Halse Anderson, YA author and creator of the WFMD challenge, posted something early this morning that got me wound up. Then later today she posted the WFMD writing prompt for the day that asks what makes us angry and challenges us to use the anger generated by the things we witness, read about or suffer to give our characters motivation and infuse our fiction with life and passion.

The first was about a situation in Republic MO, the same district that recently tried to ban Anderson's YA book Speak whose teenage protagonist was raped. Her post wasn't about the book banning though but about a recent lawsuit filed against that school district alleging that a special needs middle school student had been harassed sexually and raped repeatedly by another student on campus, had gone to the school officials who interviewed her without her mother present and forced her to retract her accusation, write a letter of apology to her rapist and deliver it to him in person and then reported her to juvenile authorities for false accusations and suspended her for the duration of the school year. Then when it happened again the following year and her mother took her to a clinic for a rape exam and the semen collected was a DNA match for the boy she'd accused the school then suspended HER for 'disrespectful conduct' and 'public displays of affection'. And now they are calling the suit frivolous!

Way to shush a victim's cries eh?

In America.

In 2011.

I was not only angry as I read about this but because some of the incidents of assault on this girl happened in the school library I was catapulted in memory to in incident in my high school library in which I was the victim of sexual harassment and assault while left in charge as student aide while the librarian attended an after school teachers meeting. I was not raped but I was in terror that I was about to be.

This was in 1976 and I did not go to the school authorities as I was confused and not quite sure what had happened to me. I was also afraid it was my own fault because I'd been reading a Harlequin Romance novel and the boy had used that as a conversation starter. My parents didn't approve of those novels even though at that time they had nothing more sexually explicit than chaste kisses so I read them secretly while at school or in the middle of the night.

I was so sheltered because of my family's religious convictions I didn't have the words or even the concepts to speak of or even think about these things. Even two years later nearing age twenty and already engaged I didn't know what a hickey was and got in trouble when my 12 year old sister acquired one from the neighbor boy while in my care.

I could have used books like Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak back then. That was the decade when YA authors had just begun to write stories for teens that addressed raw reality subjects like sexual issues, domestic violence, bigotry, bullying etc. I remember some of the controversy about Judy Blume books from about that time.

I was right to suspect that I'd be blamed because when I told my mother that evening (leaving out the romance novel) she asked me if I thought maybe the fact that I'd recently took the hem of the dress I wore that day up two inches might have had anything to do with encouraging this boy. And then the next day told me that Daddy said 'Next time tell him to go take a cold shower.'

Next time?

Next time!!?

The school library had always been my safe haven but it never was again.

Laurie asked in today's prompt what makes us THAT angry and she didn't mean those daily irritants like rudeness, lateness, messes made by others but:

What pisses you off? What action, person, offense, crime, indignity, injustice, horror scratches your soul like a sulphur-tipped match on sandpaper? I’m not talking about the jerk who cuts you off in traffic, or a parking ticket, or a partner who leaves socks on the living room floor. I’m talking about dangerous anger. World-changing anger. Revolutionary rage.

The one time in my life that I got THAT angry was in 1994 when I saw an infant disciplined by his father for crying by the holding of the hand over the mouth during the exhale to 'deprive him of the reward of hearing his own voice'. And every other adult and child in the room sat there as though nothing was wrong. Including me.

That very hour in my heart and soul though silently for several months I repudiated the fundamentalist sect I'd been raised in as it became clear to me that it's teachings were the root and leaf of this child rearing style that made seem normal what should have been anathema.

For me it is the taking of the voice of the victim, dissident, and socially powerless.

There are many more subtle ways of taking the voice from those whose words disturb the societal norm than a hand over the mouth or the cutting out of the tongue or burning of books. One is the deliberate and systematic sabotage of an education that gives one the vocabulary, the concepts, the historical frame of reference to be able to think about and thus talk about injustice and other wrong perpetrated by the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor, the insider against the outsider, the majority against the minorities.

Which is exactly why books like Speak get banned. And sex education, evolution, ethnic studies among other subjects are removed from curriculum and students are tested only on memorizable facts not the ability to think about them and talk radio hosts talk about open season on liberals defined as anyone who disagrees with them out loud and governments act in secret to keep us uninformed and corporations spend billions on a politician's campaign prevent regular people from competing for their loyalty and votes are suppressed and unions are broken and activists are assassinated and 'free speech zones' are created for protesters in locations they are least likely to be noticed by their intended audience and terrorists bomb civilians and the people are told a war is about bringing civil rights to oppressed people when its really about profit and in the name of that war civil rights are taken from the very people sending their sons and daughters to fight and corporations sue those who dare to question the quality of their product and oil companies discourage pictures of distressed dolphins and duck in the midst of an oil spill and children are punished for crying or speaking uncomfortable truths to adults and mothers shame daughters for being unladylike when they raise their voice and preachers excoriate parishioners for asking uncomfortable questions and religions and other social constructs prize obedience over all other virtues including integrity.

So many ways. And every one of them makes my tongue into a hissing flame. My fifteen minute exercise this evening will be a seething rant because I've deliberately damped the burbling cauldron of my rage over voice suppression for the purpose of this post. I tell myself its because I need to remain coherent here or that some of it is TMI for the intended audience but I'm sure that it is at least partly that I'm still voluntarily suppressing my own voice out of habit or fear. And that is incredibly angering.

But I always have preferred to channel strong emotions through my fictional characters. But on the other hand I still carry much anxiety around the feeling of anger. In my family all evidence of strong emotion was seen as disrespect which they supported with Bible verses equating anger to hate to murder and laughter as reserved for glee over the calamity of the evil ones.

Despite having broken away from those teachings nearly twenty years ago I continue to carry the habits of thinking and feeling instilled in me fifty years ago. And I wonder how much that has to do with the fact I struggle so to finish my stories and to submit the completed poems and stories for publication. If so, I myself am the voice suppressor.

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