rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2019-08-23 11:25 am
rachelmanija) wrote2019-08-23 11:25 am
The Mysterious Shrinking House, by Jane Louise Curry
In my ongoing efforts to review ALL the books I read, and which I invite you to join in on, I present to you The Mysterious Shrinking House (original title: Mindy’s Mysterious Minature), by Jane Louise Curry, a Scholastic children's book from 1970.
Mindy, whose parents run an antique shop in which they also live, bids ninety cents and a crate of pop bottles at an auction to win a filthy and decrepit dollhouse. But when she cleans it, she finds that it’s beautiful and incredibly intricate. Then her father uses SCIENCE to figure out that it was a regular house that got shrunk. (Upon microscope examination, he finds that the cells of the wood in a table are way tinier than normal wood cells, and reasons that rather than being a small thing carved from normal wood, the wood itself has been shrunk.)
Mindy’s elderly neighbor Mrs. Bright recognizes the house as her own childhood home which mysteriously disappeared. (Literally, it just vanished into thin air. This was so weird that nobody wanted to discuss it ever.) When she and Mindy examine it, there is an explosion, and then they are shrunk and end up in the dollhouse!
The first part of this book (up to this point) is delightful. I have a weakness for tiny things, being tiny, and normal things being huge, and was hoping for life in a dollhouse, facing down giant chipmunks, etc. That is not how the story goes.
And then there is an unexpected amount of plot.
It turns out that an evil dude with a shrinking/enlarging machine, previously seen displaying an undue amount of curiosity in the dollhouse, accidentally smallified Mindy and Mrs. Bright, then used his machine to briefly make it HUGE, thus smashing the barn where it was stored as a cover-up for him stealing the dollhouse, then shrinks the dollhouse, steals it (not knowing anyone is inside it), and takes it to join his exhibition of miniature houses.
Mindy and Mrs. Bright learn that the evil dude’s evil dad shrank most of the houses in a village when most of the people were at the fair, and created a miniature exhibition without ever learning that a few people got shrunk with them. These people have hidden within the houses, which are cleaned regularly and exhibited to the public, for FIFTY YEARS, huge numbers of visitors, and two generations of evil dudes without anyone ever realizing they were inhabited. They steal flour and bake bread! They watch TV through cracks in the mini drapes! And they have grown so accustomed to their lives that they are horrified when Mindy and Mrs. Bright propose… escape!
My suspension of disbelief broke both at TWO evil dudes never noticing there are six people in his mini houses in FIFTY YEARS (it’s not like the Borrowers, where they have the run of a normal-size house), and also at the people never trying to use the shrinking machine in reverse or just leaving when they first got there, before they all fell into a state of learned helplessness. They all had family and friends! There’s a five-year-old girl who is now an old woman because the random selection of villagers who got shrunk were totally useless!
The plan to get de-shrunk is clever (they get the evil dude to believe that he needed to enlarge the mini bank to acquire the bonds within) but I couldn’t get over the village of useless people and the weirdly depressing story of the little girl who missed out on her entire life until she was 55.
Also, needed more giant chipmunks. A giant chipmunk is briefly glimpsed, but that's all.
The Mysterious Shrinking House ( mindy's mysterious miniature)
Mindy, whose parents run an antique shop in which they also live, bids ninety cents and a crate of pop bottles at an auction to win a filthy and decrepit dollhouse. But when she cleans it, she finds that it’s beautiful and incredibly intricate. Then her father uses SCIENCE to figure out that it was a regular house that got shrunk. (Upon microscope examination, he finds that the cells of the wood in a table are way tinier than normal wood cells, and reasons that rather than being a small thing carved from normal wood, the wood itself has been shrunk.)
Mindy’s elderly neighbor Mrs. Bright recognizes the house as her own childhood home which mysteriously disappeared. (Literally, it just vanished into thin air. This was so weird that nobody wanted to discuss it ever.) When she and Mindy examine it, there is an explosion, and then they are shrunk and end up in the dollhouse!
The first part of this book (up to this point) is delightful. I have a weakness for tiny things, being tiny, and normal things being huge, and was hoping for life in a dollhouse, facing down giant chipmunks, etc. That is not how the story goes.
And then there is an unexpected amount of plot.
It turns out that an evil dude with a shrinking/enlarging machine, previously seen displaying an undue amount of curiosity in the dollhouse, accidentally smallified Mindy and Mrs. Bright, then used his machine to briefly make it HUGE, thus smashing the barn where it was stored as a cover-up for him stealing the dollhouse, then shrinks the dollhouse, steals it (not knowing anyone is inside it), and takes it to join his exhibition of miniature houses.
Mindy and Mrs. Bright learn that the evil dude’s evil dad shrank most of the houses in a village when most of the people were at the fair, and created a miniature exhibition without ever learning that a few people got shrunk with them. These people have hidden within the houses, which are cleaned regularly and exhibited to the public, for FIFTY YEARS, huge numbers of visitors, and two generations of evil dudes without anyone ever realizing they were inhabited. They steal flour and bake bread! They watch TV through cracks in the mini drapes! And they have grown so accustomed to their lives that they are horrified when Mindy and Mrs. Bright propose… escape!
My suspension of disbelief broke both at TWO evil dudes never noticing there are six people in his mini houses in FIFTY YEARS (it’s not like the Borrowers, where they have the run of a normal-size house), and also at the people never trying to use the shrinking machine in reverse or just leaving when they first got there, before they all fell into a state of learned helplessness. They all had family and friends! There’s a five-year-old girl who is now an old woman because the random selection of villagers who got shrunk were totally useless!
The plan to get de-shrunk is clever (they get the evil dude to believe that he needed to enlarge the mini bank to acquire the bonds within) but I couldn’t get over the village of useless people and the weirdly depressing story of the little girl who missed out on her entire life until she was 55.
Also, needed more giant chipmunks. A giant chipmunk is briefly glimpsed, but that's all.
The Mysterious Shrinking House ( mindy's mysterious miniature)
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