Milo drifted through his days without interest or curiosity about anything around him.
School felt pointless, home felt dull, and nothing he could think of seemed worth doing.
Then one afternoon a mysterious package appeared in his room with no explanation at all.
Inside was a small tollbooth and a map and a set of instructions written in careful handwriting.
Milo assembled the booth, stepped into his toy car, and drove through it without much expectation.
The moment he passed through, the grey walls of his bedroom dissolved into a bright and busy landscape.
He had arrived somewhere that rewarded exactly the kind of attention he had never before thought to give.
A tollbooth changed Milo's world.

Norton Juster's Phantom Tollbooth begins with a portrait of a particular kind of misery that many readers recognize.
Milo is not unhappy in any dramatic or obvious way — he is simply entirely without curiosity or engagement.
He moves through his days like a sleepwalker, present in body but absent in the most important sense possible.
The tollbooth that appears in his room is less a magical object than an invitation to pay a different kind of attention.
When Milo drives through it he is not transported to another dimension so much as to another way of experiencing the world.
The landscape he enters rewards wonder, curiosity, and the willingness to take language and ideas seriously.
It is, in other words, the world Milo has always inhabited — seen for the first time through genuinely open eyes.
The tollbooth did not change the world; it changed the only thing that needed changing, which was Milo himself.
A tollbooth changed Milo's world.