84 pages • 2 hours read
N. D. Wilson100 Cupboards
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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The Lure and Danger of Adventure
Adventures always contain risks. Those who pursue adventure sometimes pay with their lives, while those who never dare often pay with a dull existence. 100 Cupboards and its characters represent this push-and-pull of risky adventure and safe avoidance. In particular, the two titular characters—Henry and Henrietta—symbolize this dichotomy. Henry yearns for more adventure but fears it; Henrietta leaps to the next exploit but takes her life in her hands when she does so. Between them is Frank, who learned the costs of exploring the cupboards and walked away from them.
There’s an old saying: “Never solve a puzzle that opens the gates of hell.” Solving such a puzzle is precisely what Henry and Henrietta do when they find and open the hidden cupboards. Henrietta shows heedless courage when she opens the Endor cupboard and boldly reaches inside, but she faces the dire consequences of such action when something evil grabs her arm and tries to pull her through. Henry rises to the occasion and stabs at the evil thing, but now that the door’s been opened, it tends to re-open, and eventually the evil thing, Nimiane, gets through.
Henry and Henrietta strongly disagree about what limits to put on their adventure. Typically, Henrietta drives their actions, but it is Henry, in his efforts to save her, who considers and executes a successful plan. For example, when Henrietta finds a Faeren, Eli, in Grandfather’s room, she chases him without pausing to consider her return. The more practical Henry strategizes a rescue effort, and when he finally locates Henrietta, she casually says, “If it helps, I’m glad you came. This place was getting spooky” (237).
Henrietta thus launches the biggest adventures, and Henry, trying to repair the damage she causes, ends up having his own adventures as well. Hers are self-created; his are responses to emergencies. Henry scolds her and tries to keep her away from the cupboards, but Henrietta responds by asking why anyone would shy away from finding out more about so delicious a mystery as the cupboards. They’re opposites who meet in the middle, but only after the adventure is too far along to stop. In them the reader finds opposite ends of a spectrum, and they may develop an understanding of their own role within that spectrum—right in the middle.
Frank, meanwhile, has seen what happens to someone—in this case, Grandfather Willis—who explores the cupboards relentlessly. Frank covers them up, but it’s a futile exercise in a family as full of curiosity and mischief as the Willises. Henrietta definitely is her grandfather’s descendant; Henry is more like Frank, a fellow immigrant from the cupboard worlds. Though they both wish for a quiet life, each already has lived a great adventure simply by moving from the cupboard worlds to Kansas.
Despite their best efforts, Henry and Frank must confront their destiny, which calls to them from the cupboards. The debate over how much courage a person should have is resolved when Henrietta simply follows her own hunches and drags the others along with her. Sometimes, it’s the adventure itself that decides how brave one must be.
Creating Your Own Family
Both Henry and Frank come from the cupboard worlds. Marooned in Kansas, each faces the challenge of forming family ties in a place far from their original home. Frank does so in part by trying to put away the cupboard worlds, while Henry finds connection by reopening those worlds.
Frank arrived in Kansas as a boy by following Grandfather into an entry hole in his world and emerging in Grandfather’s room. Grandfather promised to help Frank return to his home world: “he was trying to find a way back and that he would help the boy when he did” (231), but his efforts failed. When bad things began coming through the cupboards, Grandfather plastered them over, permanently separating Frank from the world—and, assumedly, family—he had known before. So Frank created his own family. He grew up, married Dotty, and they had three kids. In this way, Frank settled into a good life with a strong family. He proves that family is the definition of home, and it is something one can create.
Henry also arrived during Grandfather’s time, and Dotty’s sister Ursula took him in. Henry grew up in Boston thinking Ursula and her husband, Phil, were his parents. His life there was formal and sheltered, and he doesn’t know anything’s missing until Ursula and Phil get kidnapped, and Henry, now 12, is sent back to Kansas to live with the Willises. His life begins to echo Frank’s, who, at that age, also lived in the same town as the result of similar circumstances. He finds among the Willises a lively and loving home, and he realizes he doesn’t miss his Boston life. Like Frank, he learns that family can be a matter of choice and creation.
The cupboards challenge him, and he begins to explore them with Henrietta. Together they develop a familiar bond that readers might recognize from their own siblings. She exasperates him, and he frustrates her, but they bond anyway, oftentimes serving to balance the other’s flaws or strengths. When Henrietta disappears down a cupboard passageway, Henry does everything in his power to locate her and bring her back home—“home” being the Willis’ house and his new family.
Henry learns he’s from the cupboard world, which explains much of his loneliness up to now, and he wants to know more about those places and find out which one he comes from. Like an adopted child who wants to know his or her ancestry, Henry yearns to search for his original world, but he does so in the company of those who love and care about him. Creating a new family, the reader sees, does not mean abandoning your old one. Without trying, Henry has found a place in the same family as that of another visitor, Frank. Together, the Willises and their newly forged family are strong enough to brave the cupboard worlds.
Solving the Puzzle with Both Logic and Chance
Intriguing as it is, the cupboard mystery practically begs to be solved. By the time Henry and Henrietta unravel only a portion of the puzzle, events unfold that force their hand: They must figure out how the cupboards work so they can defend against their dangers.
Solving the puzzle is equal parts logic and chance. Henry pursues strategies of logic, using the compass arrows on one cupboard door to try to open the others. He uses simple arithmetic to calculate the number of possible combinations—they’re in the hundreds—but when Henrietta reveals more arrows, it becomes apparent that the number of possible lock combinations multiply into the thousands. Henry’s strategic approach to solving this puzzle is not enough, and the cousins need more guidance. They find it in journals hidden in Grandfather’s room, one of which reveals the combinations to all the doors.
They also need chance on their sides, and that often comes at the hands of Henrietta. She is willing to take a risk on chance—putting her hand into Endor, following Eli—to see where it leads. This often results in dire consequences, but it also propels the entire family closer to a resolution in solving the puzzle.
When Henrietta disappears, Henry must combine logic, chance, and the efforts of others to find her. He uses clues from the journals, employs the assistance of Richard, and, through a process of elimination and luck, stumbles onto Henrietta’s location.
Ultimately, the puzzle presented by the cupboards—and the many puzzles that come from this first one—cannot be solved simply through logic or chance; it requires both. This is a valuable lesson in life, where intentional planning breeds success, but even the best-laid plans fall victim to chance.
