Moon Rocket by Elizabeth Spencer, 1960
The magic trick:
Using an inciting incident to set up an inciting incident
It’s not particularly unusual to see a coming-of-age story feature a young protagonist who gets shaken out of their immature worldview by a calamitous event. So it is not surprising to see what befalls Bill here – the boy who spends so much time dreaming about going to the moon that he almost forgets to go trick-or-treating on Halloween night.
In short, he gets beat up.
What is surprising, though, is that it’s not fight that shakes him out of childlike dream world. It’s something else even more potent.
And that’s quite a trick on Spencer’s part.
The selection:
Everybody had to knock. If they didn’t, he would turn into Dongoo, the flying saucer pilot, and speak nothing but Orion. “That’s because you wouldn’t knock,” he would explain. It wasn’t me, Bill,” his sister would argue. “It was Mother that didn’t knock.” “I don’t care!” he would say, sometimes in English, sometimes in Orion. Once he had gone everywhere on all fours speaking Orion and, from time to time, barking. He at last explained, getting up after he had driven a splinter into his knee, that he was Zoa, faithful dog of Dongoo, the flying saucer pilot. His father, who had an aunt by marriage named Zoa, said that it was a girl’s name and wouldn’t do. “Let’s not make it any more complicated,” his mother advised. “Anyway, dogs can’t talk,” his sister said. She thought she had him there: she was very dumb. “They can on Orion,” he hardly took the trouble to reply.
So now they knocked.
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