osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2021-12-26 08:59 am
osprey_archer) wrote2021-12-26 08:59 am
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Book Review: Poor Stainless
My very first fandom - before I was aware of fandom as a social phenomenon, or indeed knew the alphabet well enough to write stories down - was Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, a series of five books about tiny people who live in the walls of old houses and get their sustenance by borrowing from the humans who live there. (Later on, they leave the house and live out in the fields, which is also enchanting.)
I LOVED the idea of Borrowers and beguiled many happy hours of kindergarten imagining tiny people living in the walls of the school, and of course moving into nearby Happy Hollow Park during the summer months when there were no schoolchildren from whom to borrow food.
So you can imagine that I was delighted to discover a hitherto unsuspected Borrower book! In the mid-sixties Mary Norton wrote Poor Stainless, which is really a short story and not a novel, but nonetheless I gobbled it right up. Arrietty and her mother Homily are sitting by the grating picking some sequins off some chiffon, and to pass the time as they do chores Homily tells Arrietty a story of the old days, when many Borrowers still lived in the house - and Stainless, a young boy from the Knife-block family, went missing for a week. (The title is ironic; Stainless is a cheerful little monster.) The nostalgic joy of reading a new Borrowers story, and enjoying a new set of beautifully detailed Borrowers illustrations by the incomparable Joe and Beth Krush…
Naturally I popped over to Mary Norton’s Wikipedia page to see if there are any OTHER Borrowers books that I may have missed. Sadly there are not, but there is one last Mary Norton book I haven’t read, Are All the Giants Dead?, which naturally I intend to correct at once.
I LOVED the idea of Borrowers and beguiled many happy hours of kindergarten imagining tiny people living in the walls of the school, and of course moving into nearby Happy Hollow Park during the summer months when there were no schoolchildren from whom to borrow food.
So you can imagine that I was delighted to discover a hitherto unsuspected Borrower book! In the mid-sixties Mary Norton wrote Poor Stainless, which is really a short story and not a novel, but nonetheless I gobbled it right up. Arrietty and her mother Homily are sitting by the grating picking some sequins off some chiffon, and to pass the time as they do chores Homily tells Arrietty a story of the old days, when many Borrowers still lived in the house - and Stainless, a young boy from the Knife-block family, went missing for a week. (The title is ironic; Stainless is a cheerful little monster.) The nostalgic joy of reading a new Borrowers story, and enjoying a new set of beautifully detailed Borrowers illustrations by the incomparable Joe and Beth Krush…
Naturally I popped over to Mary Norton’s Wikipedia page to see if there are any OTHER Borrowers books that I may have missed. Sadly there are not, but there is one last Mary Norton book I haven’t read, Are All the Giants Dead?, which naturally I intend to correct at once.
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