The story centers around 100 cupboards, each with a door different in color, shape, and locking mechanism. Henry and Henrietta discover most of the cupboards hidden behind plaster on the wall of Henry’s attic bedroom: “All of it was made up of small cupboard doors” (44). Each door leads to a different place, except when they lead nowhere, and many lead to different worlds altogether. One cupboard, big enough for a person to crawl through, sits in Grandfather’s room. Henry and Henrietta begin to figure out how to use this cupboard to visit the worlds inside the ones on the wall.

Magical cupboards and cupboards are recognizable symbols from many children’s novels in which they serve as portals to different worlds. Readers may recall Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland approaching the small door in the rabbit hole and, after drinking a potion, entering it into a different world. Or they may recognize in Grandfather’s cupboard similarities to the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, in which a family of young children explores an alternate world through the back of a wardrobe. In these books, as in Wilson’s, readers learn that incredible, diverse landscapes are hidden within the trappings of the everyday.