Tiny people again! A favorite genre of mine and a classic title that I can’t believe I’d never read before. What a series to miss!
This was another morning read in our house, one I used as a wake-up call to the kids. At about 6:30am, I turn on their light, turn off their heater, and plop myself into a bed and start reading. It’s such a calm way to start the day, with a story that brings them out of their slumbers, avoiding any of the oversleeping and frustrating last-minute departures to school that I’m sure will plague their coming teenage years.
The Borrowers by Mary Norton started off fairly slow, and I wasn’t sure at first if my kids would take to it. In the opening pages, an older lady and a young girl are quilting when Mrs. May begins telling young Kate about the weird stories her brother had shared about his convalescence in England many years ago.
As Mrs. May gets into the story about her brother and the tiny people he swears he met, the chapters quickly morph from story-telling to live action, a transition that for me as a reader was both surprising and refreshing. Rather than having to use an old-lady’s voice as she recounts former conversations, I could become the characters themselves, which made for much better reading aloud! I got to become little Pod and Homily and Arrietty to my kids, fit with backwoods British accents that breathed life into the unbelievable tale and drew my kids right in.
I’ll be honest, though, this story is pretty dated. Even I was thrown by some of the household items Norton describes as objects taken by the Borrowers. I can’t recall which, but my daughter asked a few times, “What’s that thing?” and I had to reply that I didn’t know. Despite such moments, however, we found this story both rich and entertaining, fit inside an imaginative world that everyone fantasizes about at one time or another.
The plot follows the Clock family who live under the kitchen floor of a home in rural England. They’re supposedly among the last of a race of people who’ve lived in this house for generations, and yet they’re living quite comfortably off the food and objects they borrow from the human residents above. The father’s getting old with no son to take over his borrowing, so he decides to bring his daughter along, only to have her be “seen” by a human boy which sets their world in an uproar.
What started as a slow, potentially boring story turned into a pretty fun adventure that my kids loved. They’ve already asked me for more, and while I’ve only got the final book in the series on my shelf right now, I’m sure I’ll be able to scrounge up the others from somewhere.
I’m always looking for great series to read, and this one’s a perfect fit for us. It’s a modern classic and just perfect for my kids at their ages (10 and 12). We don’t know what’s going to happen to this wonderful little family or how they’re faring across the field in the badger set with the cousins, but hopefully we’ll soon find out!
©2023 E.T.
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