A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

An excellent middle-grade supernatural mystery about family, friendship, and ghosts.

Twelve-year-old Amy is unhappy about always having to babysit her developmentally disabled eleven-year-old sister Louann, which means she doesn't get any alone time with her own friends. (It also means Louann doesn't get to have her own friends, though this isn't something Amy realizes yet.)

After a last-straw incident, Amy ends up staying over with her aunt Clare so she and Louann can get a break from each other for a little while. Amy and Aunt Clare have barely met, as Aunt Clare only recently moved into the neighborhood to stay at the previously vacant old family house until she gets a new job and can move back to the city. To Amy's delight, there's a dollhouse in the attic which is a perfect replica of the old house - complete with dolls of her deceased grandparents, Aunt Clare as a teenager, and Amy's father as a little boy.

Aunt Clare hates the dollhouse to the point where she doesn't even want to talk about it. The other thing no one in the family wants to talk about? What exactly happened to their grandparents. This gets extra awkward when Amy realizes that the dolls seem to be moving around by themselves...

A fast-paced, fun, spooky book with good family dynamics. Louann and Amy's relationship is central to the book, as is the dysfunctional position their parents have put them in by infantilizing Louann and not letting either her or Amy have their own independent lives. The mystery of what's going on with the dollhouse and why goes some way toward explaining why their parents are like that, and a long way toward explaining why Aunt Clare is the way she is. More importantly, it catalyzes a positive change in Amy and Louann's relationship, as well as their individual relationships with other people, when the two of them first have to function separately for the first time in their lives, then have to figure out the haunted dollhouse together.

This is not a "disabled people are magical" book - Louann and Amy have different strengths that help them deal with the supernatural, without that trope coming into play at all. The book does contain depictions of ableism but they're not endorsed by the author.

Thanks, mildred_of_midgard!

A brother and sister notice strange goings-on in the previously unoccupied garden next door, and decide to investigate. What follows is an utterly delightful cavalcade of wish-fulfillment, humor, small-scale adventure, and charm, as they fly on magical sunflower petals, shrink to the size of ants, and confront a dragon.

If you, like me, read this book about thirty years ago and have been trying to remember it ever since, it's the one with the magical mint leaves and the shrunken kids stuffing themselves on chocolate cake crumbs.

An absolute delight, one of Chew's best. The illustrations are completely magical. I especially like Susan dangling from a weed to get the attention of the cat menacing her brother, the cat's eyes crossing as she tried to focus on the girl jumping on her nose, and the salamander-like dragon.

The Witch's Garden is included in a collection with two other Chew books. I haven't read The Witch's Cat but The Witch's Buttons is great.

Brother and sister Scott and Ruth buy a “build anything” kit, and quickly discover that the semi-invisible hammer marked “sizer” can change the size of objects… and people. Next thing they know, they’re driving around in matchbox cars, capturing a burglar in a toothbrush glass, and exploring a medieval world inside a castle they built themselves.

This isn’t one of my very favorites of Chew’s books, as I like her magic in the real world best and a lot of this one takes place in the past, but it’s sweet and charming and the whole matchbox car sequence is hilarious.

Do It Yourself Magic

It's included in this ebook omnibus:

Brother and sister Peter and Jessica Blake convince their parents to buy a dollhouse inhabited by five circus dolls at an auction. There they meet Clara Clapshaw, the old woman whose stuff is being sold so she can move into a nice retirement home… which is at risk of going under. Uh-oh. And for added uh-oh, a weird magician bids against them and is angry when he doesn’t win.

Clara tells them that she got the dolls and house from Selena Pico, the last of a circus family, and that the dolls—the Picolinis—were based on the Pico family. She adds that they might be magical and oh yeah, there was possibly a Pico treasure that Selena had meant her to have that could save her retirement home but who knows where it’s gone?

Back at the Blake home, we learn that the Picolinis are alive and eager to get the treasure to Clara, BUT if anyone who doesn’t already believe in them sees them, they will become dolls. (The Picolinis are living replicas of the Picos but not their souls incarnated in dolls, as they were alive when the Picos were alive and mourned their deaths.)

A series of adventures ensues in which the Picolinis send messages to the kids by means of getting around the house in delightful ways like stringing wire between banisters so the tightrope walker can walk across it, the acrobat doing hand-springs down stairs, etc. The kids and their parents, meanwhile, follow the clues, search for the treasure, and evade the evil magician.

Finally, a book about tiny and/or circus people that was actually about tininess and circusness! It is very charming and also has delightful illustrations.

Thank you to everyone who recced this!

Picolinis, The

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. ( Read more... )

Also, needed more giant chipmunks. A giant chipmunk is briefly glimpsed, but that's all.

The Mysterious Shrinking House ( mindy's mysterious miniature)

Twelve-year-old orphan Maggie flames out of a succession of schools, as she’s decided that since everyone will hate her anyway, the best thing to do is make sure that happens immediately to skip the disappointment. She’s then sent to live with two awful aunts and a very strange uncle in a giant house where she discovers two living dolls and a living china dog in the attic.

I read this book when I was a kid and found it memorable without actually liking it, partly because I was very confused by the ending. I re-read it to see if the ending would make more sense as an adult, and also if I’d like it more. (Respectively, sort of and no.)

Maggie has two habits which make sense under the circumstances, but which did not endear her to me. One was her method of pre-emptively making people hate her, which was to be as mean and obnoxious as possible. The other is a mental game in which she explains ordinary things to the imaginary “Backwoods Girls,” who have never heard of anything, while she calls them stupid. This is present throughout the book, and goes on and on and ON for page after page after page. It was beyond tedious.

Her aunts are plain terrible. Her uncle is clearly supposed to be endearing, but he speaks entirely in unfunny whimsical jokes and flights of fancy, and literally never says anything normal ever, not even when it’s clear that his “humor” is confusing and upsetting Maggie.

The living dolls are in an extremely Uncanny Valley in that I think they’re supposed to be slightly creepy but mostly lovable, but came across to me as mostly creepy but not in a scary or fun/scary way. They’re dolls possessed or animated by the spirits of Maggie’s ancestors who died in a fire, and sit drinking imaginary tea and reading the newspaper headline about their death without ever understanding that’s what it is, and having the same conversations over and over and over. This afterlife seems more subtly horrific than sweet to me, especially as the way they keep looping through the same conversations and not remembering things is unintentionally reminiscient of dementia. Or maybe that is intentional, who knows.

Maggie gets angry and smashes the dolls around, cracking the male doll’s head and knocking off the dog’s ear and detaching the woman doll’s leg. She fixes them later, but damaging inanimate but sentient things, especially if they feel pain as these dolls do, is a huge squick/creep-out for me and did not endear her to me.

I like a lot of stuff that’s dark in some way or another, whether it’s scary horror or just deals with dark topics, but this book just felt unpleasant and unenjoyable.

Spoilers!

( Read more... )

Did any of you read this book? Did you like it better than I did? It’s widely beloved and won lots of awards, but appears to be currently out of print.

Behind the Attic Wall

BB is the pen-name of Denys Watkins-Pitchford (1905-1990), based, according to Goodreads, on the lead shot he used on geese. He wrote a whole bunch of nonfiction about the English countryside, which I am certain I would adore. Unfortunately, it's all out of print and expensive.

ETA 10 years later: Wheee, a lot of it is now back in print in ebook!

In The Little Grey Men, the last gnomes in Britain, three tiny brothers, decide to go looking for their missing brother Cloudberry, who sailed up the river two years ago and never returned.

This book ought to be on the same list of British countryside classics as Watership Down and The Wind In The Willows, which it somewhat resembles. (Down to a mystical drop-in by Pan.) It was a favorite of mine as a child, and it holds up when I read it as an adult. “BB” balances sweetness with the harsh realities both of nature and of encroaching civilization to create a book that is enchanting but unsentimental.

While there is enough adventure, danger, and charming tiny details like the gnomes’ name for rabbits (Bub’ms) or the delicious-sounding meals the gnomes create from smoked minnows, blackberries, and peppermint creams to delight the child that I was, I found myself now responding most to the sad and lovely evocation of the vanishing English countryside, and of time passing by. In 1942, according to the author, there were only four gnomes left in Britain; now, one supposes, there are none.

(When I posted this on Usenet's rasfw about a million years ago, Jo Walton replied on Usenet's rasfw with a great little monograph on the endangered gnomes of Britain, who did indeed survive into the present day.)

Little Grey Men



BB also wrote a sequel, Down the Bright Stream

Bizarre sequel to the lovely Little Grey Men.

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This book reminded me of the hilarious scene in What Katy Did Next in which Katy got so bored with telling stories to Amy about a sickly-sweet pair of siblings that she told one in which they were crushed by an avalanche and not found until the snow melted in the spring.