A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This is the original book published in 1924. I have no idea how I missed this for so long, because it’s SO up my alley.

Four children are left alone when their alcoholic father dies, their mother having died long ago. Their father told them their only relative is their grandfather and he’s mean, so the kids flee into the night rather than be sent to him. That is the last time anyone will think of their father; this is not a book about grief and trauma.

The kids find an abandoned boxcar in the woods near a town, and proceed to transform it into a cozy home. The oldest boy works in town to make money for food, and events eventually reveal that their grandfather is in that very town and is a very nice person who will give them a good home. But really the story is about four kids living cozily in a boxcar in the woods, making stews and rescuing cups from the dump and digging a swimming hole. If that is something you like, you will certainly enjoy this story.

I know this has a bazillion sequels. What are the sequels about? Do they also feature boxcar homemaking coziness?

An unusual children's novel with elements of fantasy, horror, and healing via secret garden, about a girl whose drawings with a special pencil come to life in her dreams. It was very loosely adapted into the movie Paperhouse, and also into a TV series I haven't seen. This is the first Storr novel I've read, as her other books are very hard to find in the US.

Marianne begins drawing while bedridden for an extended period with an unnamed illness. She misses her school term, and gets a governess to teach her at home. Bored and frustrated, she quizzes the governess about her other students, and learns that she's also teaching a boy named Mark, who is partly paralyzed after having polio and is refusing to do the physical therapy that might allow him to to walk again. Marianne is baffled and fascinated by this: she's stuck in bed when she wants to get out, and Mark is supposed to get out but doesn't want to.

Marianne picks up a pencil that once belonged to her grandmother and draws a house in a grassy plain, with a boy's face looking out of the window.

That night she wakes and finds herself on the plain, looking up at the house. It feels more eerie than in her drawing, as her child's drawings with poorly proportioned flowers and grass look weird and alien when replicated in reality. She and the boy call to each other, but he can't let her in because the door doesn't have a knob and, he says, the house has no stairs.

The next day, Marianne draws in a doorknob and stairs. When she goes inside, she meets a boy who stays sitting on the windowsill, doesn't believe anything Marianne says, and refuses to come with her to verify some things (like the existence of stairs), not even when all he'd need to do is walk across the room.

Over a series of dreams, the boy is confirmed to be Mark. He eventually admits that he can't walk, but continues to deny that Marianne drew the house, and also denies anything Marianne tells him about things in the house that are out of his line of sight. Marianne gets obsessed with proving that she really can draw things into existence, and begins drawing all sorts of things that then appear in the dream. But when he still refuses to believe that she drew them, they get in a big fight. Angrily, Marianne draws some scary things into the picture to punish him...

There are sequences in this book that would have scared the living daylights out of me had I read it as a kid, and they're pretty unsettling even as an adult. Coexisting with that is the off-kilter comedy of the literal way that Marianne's drawings appear in dreams, with sausages on the floor because the drawing was getting too cluttered to put them anywhere else. There's also a delightful coziness and domestic magic in her ability to draw a cozy space.

The dream world is both a refuge from their real world, with comfort and companionship and even a safe place to practice physical therapy, and a reflection of it, reversed as reflections are, with the threats coming from without (Marianne's horrifying creatures) rather than within (illness). It's a short but complex work.

This unique novel is somewhat deniable fantasy, as it's never objectively confirmed that the Mark who appears in Marianne's dreams is the same Mark who exists in reality. He sure seems like an independent person rather than someone Marianne could dream up, though.

The illustrations are essential, as some are of Marianne's drawings, some are of her drawings come to life, and some are of the real world.

Osprey Archer writes in reference to Susan Coolidge's Clover, You know what is wrong with modern-day books? Not enough picnics. It’s like at some point someone said “You know, people find it really boring when the characters have a good time,” and therefore good times were banished from books FOREVERMORE, even though really picnics and tea parties and canoe excursions is often exactly what I want.

I also enjoy many old and old-fashioned books like Clover for that exact reason: they have picnics. Picnics, and rambles in the woods, and decorating one's house, and long conversations that are not arguments, and other scenes which are not based on interpersonal conflict. These books generally also have interpersonal conflict. But they have long stretches without it.

Osprey Archer's point about picnics struck me because I had recently had a long discussion over email with Sholio regarding romance novels. We were giving someone notes on their romance novel, and we'd both thought that the balance of interpersonal conflict to the couple having fun together and enjoying each other's company needed to be shifted away from the former and toward the latter.

I realized that this is a thing that writers are often taught not to do. Everything in the story must advance the plot or it should be cut! Every scene must contain conflict! You can't just have characters hanging out together and that's the entire purpose of the scene!

But in a lot of romance, the engine that drives the story isn't conflict, it's relationship development. And conflict (including internal conflict) is not the only way to make that happen. Play is another one: the couple engages in some form of fun shared activity together, character is developed and bonding occurs through that, and the relationship is moved forward. That can also happen based on increased knowledge (getting to know you conversations, or meeting other important people in your loved one's life).

If you're not used to reading romance or have only experienced the high-conflict, slap-kiss type, this can feel very counter-intuitive as a writer and weird as a reader. It feels like you or the writer is doing it wrong. They're not. They're just doing it differently.

The "secret garden" genre, which is a personal favorite of mine, is even less conflict-based than romance. That's the one where a sad, lonely, troubled, or unfulfilled person discovers a garden or some other private space, renovates and spends time in it, and finds their psyche blossoming along with their garden. This genre can have external conflict, and often includes some element of "can I keep this space?" But it's not the primary driver. Neither is internal conflict: the character is typically not conflicted at all about their desire to explore their garden and nourish themselves. The driver of this genre is emotional healing, environmental exploration, and character development.

Conflict is not the only way to build a story. Some stories are primarily driven by other factors, and that's okay. Even in a conflict-driven story, you don't necessarily need it in every scene. (If your book feels exhausting, maybe you need a break from all that conflict; if you want the conflict to count, giving it a rest rather than belaboring it may help.)

I wish more writers felt free to write picnics.

By the author of the Moomin books, which like many children’s classics are wise and strange, alternating comfort with manageable scares, and filled with the closely observed details of a world familiar to the author but alien to many readers. The same can be said of this adult novel, though the fears addressed are rather less easily manageable.

Jannson spent much of her life on a tiny island off the coast of Finland, and The Summer Book, which reads like a memoir regardless of its actual autobiographical content or lack of same, is set on a similar island. Sophia, a six-year-old girl filled with the irrational moods and passions of the very young, and her grandmother, filled with the layered experience and perspective of the very old, live on it along with Sophia’s father, who is a benign but occasional presence, and a great deal of wildlife.

There is virtually no plot, just a series of character portraits and incidents: a child visits to keep Sophia company and ends up annoying the entire family, a cat fails to live up to Sophia’s ideals, the grandmother creates sculptures in a forest, a family friend with an unnamed boat salvages floating whiskey and fireworks which don’t go off. Jansson gets more emotional mileage out of a flooded dollhouse than many authors get from a natural disaster.

Sophia’s mother has died, a fact which is mentioned exactly once, and her grandmother is in poor health; the submerged story is of mortality, of what it’s like to face the end of life and what it’s like to face the beginning. Both are frightening and require careful attention to the small details; both enable those details to be observed with crystalline clarity. Every word and image counts, the psychology of little children and animals is dead-on, and there’s a lot of dry, sardonic humor.

Some of my favorite books and shows and movies are in this genre, stories about people and places and the way things and jobs and ecologies work, with conventional plot either dispensed with or appearing as an afterthought: Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede, in which the day-to-day work of a nunnery is prayer made physical; Anita Desai’s Peacock Garden Desai Long Ago (no relation to the Godden book of the same name), in which a girl hiding from the violence of Partition within a mosque’s walled garden finds it a miniature paradise; the anime and manga Mushi-shi: The Complete Series, which do have plots but are really about the intricate and beautiful workings of an entirely invented magical ecology; the movie My Neighbor Totoro, with its soot sprites and the cat bus and spirits waiting with umbrellas; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, perhaps the prototype of all these stories of small worlds, of growing things and growing children, of life and death and profound spiritual revelations embodied in a single blade of grass.

Thank you very much, madam_silvertip! I loved it and I never even heard of it till it arrived in the mail.