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 (1989), The Mys­tery of the Cup­board (1993), and T …