Somewhere around 1993 I spent an entire Saturday trying every key in our house on every locked thing we owned. Desk drawers, a toolbox, a suitcase in the garage that turned out to contain my dad's tax returns. This book is the reason. If you handed nine-year-old me a premise better than "an old cupboard and one specific key can turn a plastic figure into a living three-inch person," I genuinely do not know what it would have been. I checked this out of the library more than once, and I have carried a warm feeling about it for three decades without cracking it open again. Then my daughter hit the right age, and I decided to find out how much of that warm feeling was the book and how much was 1993.
The setup, for the uninitiated: Omri gets a disappointing plastic Indian figure from his best friend Patrick for his ninth birthday, plus an old medicine cupboard from his brother. The only key in the house that fits is the one from his great-grandmother's jewellery box. Figure goes in, key turns, and in the morning there's a living, breathing, extremely opinionated Iroquois man named Little Bear standing in the cupboard, who briefly assumes Omri is a god and then, having ruled that out, starts bossing him around.
The part that still works, and it really does work
Banks takes the premise seriously in the way kids take everything seriously, and that's the engine of the whole book. Being in charge of an actual tiny person is a logistical and moral nightmare, and the writing sits inside that nightmare instead of skipping past it. The strongest thread in the book is Omri slowly figuring out that Little Bear is a real person with a real history. When Omri offers him a tipi, Little Bear rejects it because the Iroquois live in longhouses, and Omri has to go actually learn something about the people he'd been treating as a category. There's a moment where a plastic figure of an elderly chief is brought to life and dies of shock, and the book lets that land as an actual death, not a plot beat. Later, when Patrick learns the secret and wants to animate half a toy store, Omri is the one arguing that these would be people, not toys. That's a sturdy thing to hand a kid. The sentences themselves move well too; I never had to fight the prose at 8:40pm, which is not something I can say about every book from this era.
The part I was not equipped to see in 1993
Here's where I have to be an adult about my own nostalgia. Native librarians and educators have been flagging this book for over thirty years. The American Indian Library Association put it on a "titles to avoid" list back in 1991, calling it a highly acclaimed book riddled with stereotypes, and rereading it now, I can't wave that off. The whole architecture of the story is a white boy in charge of a Native man who exists at his pleasure, and the book only partially notices that this is weird. Boone, the cowboy Patrick brings to life, calls Little Bear "savage" and "dirty" right there in the text, and while the two of them do come around to trusting each other (after Little Bear puts an arrow in Boone's chest over an old Western on TV, which, fair), the frame around all of it is a 1980 British author's mixed bag of received ideas about American Indians. I loved this book as a kid and never once thought about who might be reading it and seeing themselves in Little Bear. That gap is the whole problem.
What actually happened at bedtime
So I didn't hand it over. We read it together, over about two weeks, and I'm glad I did it that way. My daughter locked onto it fast; the miniature logistics got her the same way they got me. But she also stopped me cold during the Boone stretch and asked why the cowboy gets to call Little Bear dirty and then everyone has to work together to save his life anyway. Which is a better question than most of the discussion prompts in the back of school editions. We ended up having our second real conversation about how Native people get written in old kids' books (the first was Island of the Blue Dolphins, earlier this year), and she treated it the way she treats everything: no visible emotion, follow-up questions like a small auditor. She did not ask to reread it when we finished. She did ask whether the person who wrote it ever met an Iroquois person, and I had to admit I didn't know.
My four-year-old was mostly not part of this, being four, but he absorbed enough of the premise secondhand that I found a plastic stegosaurus shut inside our bathroom medicine cabinet the next morning. He checked it before breakfast for five straight days. He has not given up so much as gone on hiatus.
Voices, re-reads, survival
As a performance, it's decent material. Boone is a gift (I did a mournful cowboy that got approved without comment, which is approval). Tommy, the World War I medic who gets pulled through the cupboard to save Boone's life and assumes he's dreaming, is a great two-scene character. Little Bear I read straight, no bit, and I'd tell you to do the same; there is no voice you can do for that character in 2026 that improves anything. Survival-wise it's a chapter book, so nobody's asking for it nine nights running, and one pass was comfortable. Would it hold up on a re-read? For the kid, maybe. For me, the second read was the one where the warm 1993 feeling and the actual book finally got sorted into separate piles, and I don't need a third read to check the piles again.
Three stars, held in tension. The fantasy is first-rate and the responsibility theme is real, and I understand why it won a shelf of awards, including our own Pacific Northwest one back in 1983. But it's not a book I'd hand to an eight-year-old and walk away from anymore. Read it with them, stop when they ask the hard question, and answer it honestly. The stegosaurus, for the record, is still in the cabinet.
