The Van Gogh Cafe, by Cynthia Rylant - Fantasy

To stay with other Cynthia Rylant books, The Van Gogh Café has that sense of goodness to it. The reader leaves with the feeling that all in life is right and that all problems in life can, and will, be solved. Rylant really outdid herself in this fantasy snap-shot novel. She brings the characters to life in a way that only she can and truly makes the reader want to be a dinner at The Van Gogh Café in Flowers, Kansas.

Set in the small, quiet town of Flowers, Kansas, a father (Marc) and daughter (Clara) run a café that use to be an old theater. This café is anything but uneventful and as the reader learns, “Anyone who has ever seen anything happen on a stage – anything – knows that a theater is so full of magic that after years and years of opening nights there must be magic enough to last forever in its walls”. Odd things, magical things, occur at The Van Gogh Café, but nobody (particularly Clara) is worried. They just know that this is what happens at the café and that magic is always abounding in a good way. The book runs periodically (each episode or chapter has its own special story that really is separated from the other chapters, but doesn’t loose it’s identify with the café and the Flower’s residents) and sequentially (the reader will follow the story from fall on into winter and spring).

I would consider this a low fantasy book, because it takes an everyday place and adds a bit of magic to it to draw onto the fantasy aspect of this book. Each little chapter has a theme and a life lesson that we can learn from and live life by. Cynthia Rylant captivates the readers with this precious little book for life lessons just as she does in her other works, An Angel for Solomon Singer, The Old Woman Who Names Things, and The Relatives Came, to name a few. It would be a joy to sit back in The Van Gogh Café, sip a cup of coffee, have a boiled egg with toast (and even some magical lemon pie – if the mood in the café was right) and just “feel” the magic coming through the walls of the café.

Each little story touched my heart, but my favorite two were The Possum and Magic Muffins. I was drawn in by the possum story because I feel that all people need a place in life and a purpose to follow. However, with that said, often times, we get off track or ignore our purpose and lead lives of despair and loneliness. In this story, a man saddened by his wife’s death, is leaving town. He is not really sure where he is going, because he feels that a chapter in his life has closed before he was ready for it to. We readers will go through these times in our lives, also. Sure, it may not be the death of a spouse, but a lost job, a relationship broken, a separation; there are all types of “life chapters” being closed all around us. Open your own eyes! I bet you can see one near you! It took a possum, hanging from a tree limb outside The Van Gogh Café to make people stop and care. Relationships were mended and a few hungry animals got a safe haven when our wayward traveling widower found his next chapter in life when he stayed in Flowers and opened up an animal shelter.

The Magic Muffins touched my heart to its very core! I am a teacher and one day a mother (God willing) and the thought of children being in a car accident, hurt, cold, and feeling abandoned, tugged my very heart strings. I loved how the concept of these muffins came to be, with a woman moving to New York City stopped to have a quick bite at the café, and decided to leave a “tip” of magic muffins. Marc and Clara thought to eat the muffins, but decided not to, in order to ward off wishes that could go wrong. Oh, how smart they were. They may have gotten their wishes, but fourteen little children may not have been healed and saved. How important a lesson for all to learn that saving something, to use at the right time, is such an important thing to do.