Lynne Reid Banks, 1929-2024

For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, Lynne Reid Banks’s Indian in the Cupboard novels held something of the same appeal as Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or The Goonies. Each centers on smart, sensitive children who happen upon something secret and unshareable with the grown-up world: a space creature in E.T., a treasure map in The Goonies, and a figurine-turned-real-man in Banks’s books.

Banks, who died on April 4 at age 94, earned a permanent place in the hearts of millennials with her charming series. The success of the original book, 1980’s The Indian in the Cupboard, shepherded a set of sequels written over the next two decades: The Return of the Indian (1986), The Secret of the Indian

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