It isn’t All Squeaky Clean at the House of Mouse
Our Kingdom of Dust is a great tale to read during the pandemic when so many of our plans have been upended and rising anxiety about jobs and the economy have us wishing for happier, safer times. It is normal to think about the places you want visit once we are able to move freely again and many of us dream of the day we can return to our beloved Disney destinations.
The same is true of Blaine McKinnon, the lead character of the story. He is hurt and angry after a major set-back at the company he built from the ground up and the discovery that all of his relationships are superficial at best. He wistfully longs for the happy times spent at Disney World when he was younger and his parents were still alive. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, taking some time away from a stressful situation can be really healing like the time my mother somehow scraped together the money to take my sister and I to Hawaii a few months after our dad died cancer. We were reeling and grieving and she showed us that life is still full of beauty and discovery even in the face of loss.
But…
What happens if you run after the joys of childhood at the cost of abandoning everything else? What lengths will you go to keep feeling the magic when a feeling can’t be sustained indefinitely? What would you do to protect the walls of the Disney bubble you’ve built around yourself when it is threatened by the sometimes excruciating pain of reality?
All bubbles pop eventually…then what?
That is the journey Blaine McKinnon takes when he heads to Disney World to mute the aching pain that is his life and discovers a group of people whose stories are different but who are also clinging to the comfort found in “the Most Magical Place on Earth”. This is a book of self-discovery and very definitely not a religious book but I cannot help but paraphrase the Bible in saying that Blaine has to come to grips with the question, “What good is it for someone to gain the whole (Disney) world, yet forfeit their soul?" (Mark 8:36) Ultimately, it isn’t really Disney World that will demand his soul; the truth is that he was already soul sick before he headed there looking for faith, trust and pixie dust. What will he do when that fragile thread of hope he grasped so desperately isn’t able to hold his heart, his soul, and all of life’s baggage?
WARNING: The characters are relatable and layered and the story is gripping but this book is not for everyone - it is full of sex, drugs, profanity, and brutality. If you were bothered by Netflix’s “Tiger King”, you will probably be bothered by this book. There is a very genuine yearning in these wounded characters and there are rays of hope and light but it is not a sanitized, family-friendly Disneyesque story. If Dostoyevsky was tackling suffering as a means of redemption for the Disney obsessed, it might look a lot like Our Kingdom of Dust. At only 192 pages, Kinsey tackles the “dark night of the soul” in a lot fewer pages than anything by Dostoyevsky and, at only $2.99 for the Kindle version (paperback and hardcover versions cost more), it is a very inexpensive and enjoyable examination of Disney escapism.
Leonard Kinsey also wrote Habst and the Disney Sabateurs, another fiction book set at Disney World. My review of that book is much shorter…I hated it; wouldn’t have minded if the main character was eaten by a dragon. In fact, I bought the two books at the same time and put off reading Our Kingdom of Dust for a long time because I disliked Habst so much but then found myself on a flight where Our Kingdom of Dust was the only thing downloaded to my phone that I had not already read and was wonderfully surprised. Habst and the Disney Sabateurs gets good reviews on Amazon so maybe I missed something. It’s Kindle version is also cheap - only $2.99 (paperback version also available) - so it isn’t a big risk if you want to give it a try.
About the reviewer: Annette is an avid reader who dreams of doing two back-to-back, long transatlantic cruises where they feed her and she has plenty of time to sit on deck reading a giant stack of books. She and husband Steve are the owners of Mouse Trip Travel, LLC, a travel agency specializing in Disney destinations. She purchased this book on Amazon and is receiving no compensation of any kind for this review.
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