I Had Seen Castles By: Cynthia Rylant

Rylant, C. (2004). I Have Seen Castles. Harcourt.

In this novel for older children, Cynthia Rylant writes from the perspective of John Dante, a man who is in his 60s and is reflecting upon his young years as a soldier. He lives in Toronto in his mature years, but the bulk of the story is spent reflecting upon the years of his youth becoming a young man in Pittsburgh. As a boy going through the normal growing pains of feeling the need to prove his manhood, he felt an especially strong patriotic fever to stand up for his country, refusing to be seen by others, especially other men, as weak or a coward. There’s a conflict of emotions, about the war itself with John and the girl he loves, Ginny. One of the things that makes him feel like he has stepped into manhood is that he was able to be with Ginny, and that upon first becoming a young soldier, he felt it gave him a more mature edge over the others in his mind. Within that disagreement in mindsets, the realism of war strips away the dreaminess of falling in love and from everyday life itself. An intensity sets in with John, about how he feels even stronger about Ginny and wanting to take and protect her from her run down, poorer life, about proving that he is a man among men to society, and within the patriotic fervor that he is caught up in as Americans were at the onset of the war’s encroachment onto American soil.


The book is a rather brisk read. Despite the given subject content’s extreme weight, the book is not heavily laden with so much extra activity as it easily could fall prey to. Rylant manages to keep the story sparse, to allow the story to focus on the mental conflict brought about by the war that due to the lack of closure with Ginny, John can never really truly shake the impact and adverse affect the war had on him the rest of his life. He talks about how it was hard to live in America after the war, and couldn’t be jubilant upon the end of the war as the rest of the greater U.S. population was, because they had not seen the suffering, blood, destruction, and gore that he had been saturated with while overseas fighting. He lived in France for 20 years, then in England and Greece, ending up in Canada. John never shook the horrors of war that stole his optimism and innocence, and even above that, never shook his endearing and sincere love for the embodiment of innocence, the young love he had in Ginny. Even though the story is not heavy with overdescription, it tells of powerful sentiments in its simplicity.

Some of the powerful phrases and lines from the story include on page 2: when he is comparing his home to “a soft-smelling grandmother” and that the worn oak floors “announced the life of the house…floors that sang.” I also liked how on page 3 he described his father’s selection of books in his library which reflected his interests and taste: “Words to bind you to this room, this house, this planet. Words to make sense of everything.” I like how he recognizes that “Children, without the skills of language, spend years developing instead an intuition” about their parents. Another true observational point he makes is how boys horseplay to show affection to one another on page 7: “the banter, the wisecracking, the cuffing and the shoving that boys must do to claim ownership of each other.” How often do we see grown men do that today, around sports, a car, a card table, etc.? Yet another behavior observation he makes quickly is when he is describing on page 10 college students biking around town, and that they “are open like flowers” so meaning they are fresh in bloom and bright and bold in their color. He makes a powerful observation when on page 16 he states that people “deceive ourselves into believing we can clean up the enemy, put him back in his place…” while still going about the normalcy of daily life after hearing of the obvious upset that the turn of the war has brought to their lives.

Another point he makes on page 19 is that “Love in those times was nuts. Not artificial, not ridiculous. No, it was so real to be completely heartbreaking. But it was nuts all the same.” This exemplifies the intensity the realness of life then set upon his already intense feelings for Ginny, and how that was never again felt by him in his life. Another point about the intensity of bonding between people echoes his need to feel like a grown man, and the bonding between men that is not easily expressed amongst them, where on page 75 he states: “And there was an intimacy among us, there on the front line, that no soldier working behind the lines would ever know or understand.” It reminds me of the 9 part mini-series Band of Brothers that I watched with a group of friends, and the guys were so into it, relishing the bond the men in the real story had. It also reminds me of my Grandpop Fox, who was one of five brothers in a family of twelve kids who were old enough to serve in the Armed Services and did so. After two of the sons (my great uncles) were killed in combat, the others were sent from the battlefields to work behind the lines. I have a copy of a local newspaper clipping that shows my great granny Fox being acknowledged as a Gold Star Mother, and I have made rubbings of their names from the York County granite memorial statue for hometown fallen heros. My mother has a letter he wrote his mother (my great grandmother) and to hear my grandfather who I had known as docile and sweet hearted to be so bitterly angry about his brothers’ deaths and wanting so bad to be back out there to pay back for their deaths was deeply real and intense to read. I thought a lot about my Grandpop Fox while I read this book, being that is my closest connection to the text, and I understand a little more why he never really discussed the war too much. Despite the serious and heavy subject matter, I did enjoy the book for what the storyline brought to my eyes about a generation other than my own.