The Mysterious Shrinking House

by Jane Louise Curry

Children's fiction. "Mindy found the miniature house hidden in the attic of the old barn. It was so perfect it looked like a real house - that had somehow shrunk. But she never guessed its terrible secret - or that she herself would be trapped inside!"

Genres: Fantasy, Childrens, Fiction, Mystery, Mystery Thriller

158 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1970

About the author

Jane Louise Curry was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, on September 24, 1932. She is the daughter of William Jack Curry Jr. and Helen Margaret Curry. Curry grew up in Pennsylvania (Kittanning and Johnstown), but upon her graduation from college she moved to Los Angeles, California, and London, England.

Curry attended the Pennsylvania State University in 1950, and she studied there until 1951 when she left for the Indiana State College (now known as Indiana University of Pennsylvania). In 1954, after graduation, Curry moved to California and worked as both an art teacher for the Los Angeles Public School District and a freelance artist. In 1957, Curry entered the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in order to study English literature, but in 1959 she left Los Angeles and became a teaching assistant at Stanford University. Curry was awarded the Fulbright grant in 1961 and the Stanford-Leverhulme fellowship in 1965, allowing her to pursue her graduate studies at the University of London. She earned her M.A. in 1962 and her Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Stanford University in 1969. From 1967-1968 and, again, from 1983-1984, Curry was an instructor of English literature at the college level. She became a lecturer in 1987. Besides her writings, Curry’s artworks are also considered among her achievements. She has had several paintings exhibited in London, and her works have even earned her a spot in the prestigious Royal Society of British Artists group exhibition. Among the many groups that Curry belongs to are the International Arthurian Society, the Authors Guild, the Children’s Literature Association, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers.

Curry illustrated and published her first book Down from the Lonely Mountain in 1965. This juvenile fiction based on Californian Native American folklore has paved the way for Curry’s expansive literary career. She has penned more than 30 novels, which are mostly based on child characters dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Many of Curry’s writings deal with folklore, such as the Native American folklore that she explores in her novels Turtle Island: Tales of Algonquian Nations and The Wonderful Sky Boat: And Other Native American Tales of the Southeast, and the retellings of famous European folk stories, such as Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Robin Hood in the Greenwood, and The Christmas Knight. Yet she also delves into the genres of fantasy, such as in her novels Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Time and Me, Myself, and I; historical fiction, such as in her novels What the Dickens and Stolen Life; and mystery, such as in her novels The Bassumtyte Treasure and Moon Window.

Curry has been honored with many awards throughout her writing career. In 1970, her novel The Daybreakers earned Curry the Honor Book award from the Book World Spring Children’s Book Festival and the Outstanding Book by a Southern California Author Award from the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People. The Mystery Writers of America honored Curry two years in a row by awarding her the Edgar Allan Poe Award, or the Edgar, for Poor Tom’s Ghost in 1978 and The Bassumtyte Treasure in 1979. Also in 1979, for her complete body of work at that time, the Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People presented Curry with the Distingushed Contribution to the Field of Children’s Literature Award.

Curry resides in Palo Alto, California, and London, England.

Reviews

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Mysterious Shrinking House comes out of the Golden Age of Scholastic Book services. Before there was R.L. Stine, there were authors like Ruth Chew, Jean S. O'Connell, and Jane Louise Curry. These authors wrote books that were tinged with mystery, magic, and menace...what could be better for kids forced to cope with the monotony of fractions and the metric system?

By the way, I am still angry at being forced to study the metric system in the 1970s, only to have it summarily abandoned by adults who wisely knew they were too lazy to switch to a system of measure that makes no damned sense, at least from a temperature standpoint. I mean, 100 degrees sounds hot...don't give me any of this 37.7 nonsense. Tip for Europeans: the next time you have a heatwave that kills 35,000 people, covert the temperature readings to Fahrenheit. Otherwise, Americans won't be moved to help you. When you say it's 41.5 degrees, we'll tell you to quit bitching. Tell us it's 106 degrees, and we'll send a fleet of Good Humor trucks and tank tops. Unless George Bush is President, of course. Then you won't get jack, no matter what your problem is.

Curry's books always have an air of menace to them, which I found engrossing as an advanced 4th grade reader. The Mysterious Shrinking House involves Mindy, a young girl who discovers what she thinks is a doll house at an estate sale. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that the house is almost *too* perfect -- all of its furniture is in perfect scale, including the glassware, pottery, and silver. Could a single craftsman had made this exquisite toy, or does the house have more sinister origins?

It's nice to see how Curry is able to weave an exciting story for kids that is dark and suspenseful. She never talks down to her audience and isn't afraid to put her protagonist in peril. I don't think this kind of book could be published in today's climate of over-protected children. If you know a young girl who enjoys mysteries, I recommend buying a copy of this from the Advanced Book Exchange -- www.abebooks.com.

[C. (Don't blank click my reviews, comment please! · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often discuss that intriguing story components only go as far as a superb storyteller brings them. Originality and intelligence heighten the dynamics with vibrant journeys that rivet readers to the details and action. Tossing a grand proposal onto a page, like Herbert Wells did, is flat.... until authors explain how their science, world, legend, or magic works! That kicks a story up to a higher level, amazes your audience, and brings your stories to life!

I discovered Jane Louise Curry in 2016 when I scooped up her first edition hardcover from 1978, for a song. I loved every inch of “The Bassumtyte Treasure” because clues, ciphers, and family keepsakes on two continents, combined with fully formed intricacy that worked! This depth of novel writing is rare. Authors are fortunate if a jangle of plots come to fruition in a reasonably well connected dénouement. I forgot why I knew her name, until it was obvious my new paperback, “The Mysterious Shrinking House” 1970, was a notch above most novels.

Mindy Hallam, her colourful Parents, and loyal dog Horace were introduced leisurely, humorously but without any wasted pages. They found a miniature house in a barn, brought it home, then weirdoes tried looking at it. Mr. Hallam noticed with astonishment that no wood was cut to fashion small items but that full tree grain was in miniature!

Meanwhile, we met Mrs. Bright, a denizen elder of their neighbourhood. She furnished all the historic information a well built story needs, an emotional personal connection, and the best person to help Mindy solve unprecedented mysteries.

The world of a small person has to adapt, even to how things sound. Nothing was overlooked, including treks to obtain food and a tricky plan to set everything right. This is a masterful, five star, community collaboration!

[Jennifer Heise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this a hundred times, and now that I'm getting older-- in a profession that has been populated with people significantly older than me my whole career-- there are certain elements I still resonate with (but it would be spoilers to tell which one.)

A mysterious dollhouse, minaturization, an elderly woman who once was young-- what's not to like? Classic.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of fun. An element of whimsical fantasy that isn't aimed for critical adult readers. However, the story unfolds in a way that challenges the reader to join Mindy in figuring out what can possibly explain her predicament, and what can she do to get out of it.

[Kelly Oliphant-wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book for the 2nd time! I read it as a child, but couldn’t remember the name of it for years. Finally, I used Google to find it using various descriptions! Yay! Such fun to remember the few pictures in the book from the lens of my childhood and see them again! Also, I was fascinated with the story of a shrinking dollhouse- then and now. I am so happy to find this book again! I am a teacher now, and my students will really enjoy hearing me read it aloud.

[Capn]

It was too perfect - the doll's house - almost as if it had shrunk from full size; and then, too, it was identical to Mrs Bright's old home . . .
A bizarre and exciting adventure story.

ISBN 0140305939 Puffin 1973, 123 pages

[Stefanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly entertaining for such an old book. I love that the dad believed in the strangeness of the shrinking house before the daughter did. More fun than the Borrowers for sure!

[Sarah Bolin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Scholastic book took me back to my childhood! I could just imagine myself right there with Mindy. I sure would have loved a real doll house like she had. And if you don't know what happens after, you will have to read to find out. A great children's book!

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorites when I was young. I forgot about it until a couple of years ago and was chagrined to find that my parents no longer had it. Thank goodness I was able to get a copy of it from Abe books. I think because I've always had a love of dollhouses that this book appealed to me so much. It's a shame that it's out-of-print because it is a delightful story.

[Shanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mindy and her elderly neighbor-friend have been shrunk along with the house they were in. Fifty years ago, a nefarious man had shrunk the house and also a whole town out of spite, and turned it into a miniature museum. The man's nephew has since taken over, and the villainous acts continue. Filled with surprising twists and turns and suspenseful moments, this is a curious and fast-paced story.

[Chrisanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have you ever been jealous of your dolls fantastic living quarters and clothes? This fun little book will cure you.

[Chazzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mindy and her parents are at another farm sale. Her parents own an antique store and are always on the lookout for items. It is hot, dusty and while the parents are at the auction Mindy decides to do a little exploring of her own. Poking around in the old barn, Mindy climbs a ladder to the loft. Buried in a corner she finds a large old doll house.

She convinces her parents to let her 'bid' on it and gets it for ninety-two cents. The family lug it home and start to clean it up. To their surprise, it is a well crafted house with tons of detail. It could very well be a real house, except it is too small for humans to live in.

A television repair man showed up to 'fix' the television. Problem was there was nothing wrong with it and nobody had called for service. Once he was in the shop he started poking around and asking about 'doll furniture.' This made Mindy's parents uncomfortable, as they hadn't said anything about the doll house.

Later while visiting with her neighbour, Mrs. Bright, Mindy tells her about the doll house. Mrs. Bright grew up in their town and can tell Mindy quite a bit of history. When Mindy is describing the house, Mrs. Bright starts asking about specifics of the structure. It seems the doll house has a lot in common with Mrs. Bright's childhood home.

Mindy takes Mrs. Bright out to view the house and while they are there a strange thing happens. They are suddenly able to go into the house! And this is where the real adventure starts.

Yes, it is a children's book, but it still was entertaining. Imagination and creativity play into the story. Has anyone ever looked at a doll house and wondered what it would be like to live in one?

[Stephanie A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely outstanding addition to the dollhouse-fiction canon. I wish I'd read this as a kid, not because I would have loved it more (impossible), but simply so I would have loved it longer. As an adult, I did find the first few chapters more exciting than the main plot -- I wanted to live forever in the opening scene at the country auction, straight out of the pages of Sold to the Lady in the Green Hat, and failing that, I would have loved an extra ten chapters just about marveling at the exquisitely crafted miniatures within the house (guess who's gonna have to take herself to the dollhouse-related nonfiction section of the library tomorrow).

But once that main plot gets going, it's still captivating, it's just that one's perspective on the mysteries of the dollhouse becomes much more up-close and immediate. The mechanics of existing as a tiny miniature person are interesting enough, but add in exploring the rest of the Lilliput U.S.A. exhibition -- not to mention the fact that these two have been, however unwittingly, kidnapped by the most obviously suspicious suspect in the history of ever, meaning that all hope is not lost since police are definitely on the cast -- and it's all tremendously exciting, in the most wholesome way.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw this in a thrift store and couldn't pass it up because I wrote my doctoral dissertation on miniatures (a thing nobody will stop you from doing!). Mine is titled The Mysterious Shrinking House, Original Title: Mindy's Mysterious Miniature, but it's clearly the same book. My favorite parts are when the characters succinctly cover aspects of the miniature on which I wasted pages and pages of boring footnoted prose. To wit:

"Dear me, and here I thought you were too old for dolls. Isn't that what you told me a few Christmases ago?"
Mindy was indignant. "It's not the same thing at all. This isn't for dolls. It's a house. Sort of like ... a model."

Go off, Mindy! Models = a synonym for miniatures, used by men use to differentiate themselves from women and children.

"Besides, even grownups collect old doll furniture." She sniffed, holding back a laugh. "Even some I know."
Mr. Hallam, whose collection of ship models included a galleon with a captain's cabin richly furnished in the old Spanish style, nodded soberly.

She read him to filth. I have never been so proud of Mindy.

Mr. Hallam redeems himself by investigating the too-perfectness of the dollhouse, even examining the furniture under the microscope (it's science, so it's okay) to confirm that the wood grain defies the laws of nature. Here begins the best and freakiest part of the book. The curtains fall like regular curtains, which they shouldn't do, and not just because the weave of the fabric is too coarse. There are natural limitations to how big and small things can be, based on things like friction and gravitational pull and the molecular (or cellular) properties of the material itself, which is why the most brilliant glass blower in the world can never make a tiny pitcher whose proportions scale perfectly to the big version. Even if you really could shrink down the wood cells the way Mr. Hallam says has happened in the dollhouse furniture, they wouldn't behave the same way--the drawers wouldn't pull right, the pages of a book made from that wood pulp wouldn't turn properly. It can never be perfect. To function like it does in the book, Mindy's dollhouse would have to obey different laws of physics.

This is getting at the source of, what would you call it, the melancholy of the miniature? The passion of the puny? Jouissance of the bijou? That feeling of being trapped between the almost-perfect and the too-perfect, the caught breath, the pain and delight. We have perhaps a hundred words for "small," which should tell us something; but I think tininess is more of a metaphor for this phenomenon than the thing itself. It's a special kind of spectatorial agitation, activated at times by cinema--not in a Mulvey sense--but in the sense of an uncanny, almost-perfect/too-perfect simulacrum. Trompe-l'oeil, ekphrasis, realistic representations of any kind, lists, old journals, even a stage set can give you that feeling. Like entering a memory and being unable to leave, revisiting your childhood home and finding everything eerily the same as when you left it. This trope appears so often in films that merge childhood with wrongness and horror--Labyrinth, Inland Empire, Scream 3, Heavenly Creatures--getting sucked back into that place you once saw dwindling in the rearview mirror of your life--regressing, shrinking, the pleasure and powerless of childhood.

In Mindy's Mysterious Miniature, Mrs. Bright time does this very literally, since the mysterious shrunken house was her childhood home. When she shrinks to enter it, she's transported back to a youthful moment of frightening sexual agency (cf. every single film listed above! I cannot even get started on that) and trapped in its eternal recurrence. The turning point of the book in when Mindy and Mrs. Bright are housenapped by the nephew of Mrs. Bright's rejected suitor, who looks just like him. (Men will literally shrink a house and trap the woman who rejected them inside it rather than go to therapy.) After the midpoint, MMM becomes a story about Mindy and Mrs. Bright trying to convince a whole miniature town full of shrunken inhabitants who have been stuck in their pasts for 40 years to escape. Including a 45-year-old woman who is still treated as a child because she was 5 when she was miniaturized. It's horrifying. Luckily the nephew who stole the houses doesn't know they're there, which is convenient because the psychosexual dimensions of that are just too much for even this freaky children's book to neutralize.

There are just SO many stories about people stuck in dollhouses. Speculative fiction by Robert Aickmann and Lisa Tuttle. Elizabeth Hand's "Illyria," in which a magical miniature theatre becomes a symbol for incestuous childhood longings. Some mid-century play involving a fucked-up dollhouse, I thought it was by Pirandello but I can't seem to find it. Obviously, Ibsen's metaphor for women being trapped and infantilized. It is a thing!

Even children's books where miniatures are putatively benign are laced with anguish and violence around the edges. This often has to do with food--Beatrix Potter's Two Bad Mice smash a miniature porcelain ham to bits in frustration that it is not a real ham--but other times with the mere perils of being small--Stuart Little stuck in the blinds, The Borrowers having their roof peeled off and then getting exterminated like rats (you tell me!!!). Alice, obviously. The thing is, as long as you're on the right side of the dollhouse, you'll keep wanting to get inside it. Once you're on the wrong side, you will need a third-act miracle to escape. It's the uncanny valley of things, and there's something painful about its pleasure. Mindy, take us out:

"We've got to get inside," Mindy whispered. "Oh, it's wonderful, it....it hurts!

[LuAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a creative, old Scholastic Book Services story from 1970, it could be consisted science fiction. I had trouble keeping the Dopple residents straight, but that didn’t really matter. I enjoyed the impact of the “newcomers” on them and their subsequent plots to regain what they’d lost. Clever to also give the dog an important role.

While the settings are fictional towns, the overall location is clearly near Ligonier, PA as routes 30 and 711 are mentioned and place names sounds vaguely like actual Pennsylvania towns. This book was republished as “The Housenapper”; not sure why the title went through two revisions.

[Debby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a delightful story with a little bit of sci-fi or fantasy taking it up a notch. Interesting language used in a book designed for grade-schoolers. Words like "hove", and "descanting", "Swivet", and "cupola" and even "handbarrow". I'd recommend this book for kids fourth or fifth grade, depending on there reading levels. But it's always great to expand a vocabulary. I'm not sure I'd ever come across swivet before and maybe not even hove.

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mysterious dollhouse, two female heroes - one young, one young-at-heart, and a faithful dog. I loved this story for its pure escapist joy. Although it was sometimes unclear when the equally mysterious machine was being used, this was great fun to read. 3/5 stars.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A childhood favorite, holds up pretty well.

[Audrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I probably would have found this book very interesting as a child, but now, I really couldn't get into it. The story has a very good premise, I just don't think it was well executed.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it as a child -reacquainted as an adult. Not as good as as I remembered it but an enjoyable enough read. Lots of plot holes!

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved, loved, loved this book as a girl. One of the very few books I have held onto over the years through MANY moves. Honestly don’t know how it holds up in current sensibilities though.

[Donald Owens II · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this as a child and just read it to my daughter, who was as taken with the premise as I was. It could have been told better, but the concept was so enchanting that I never noticed. So fun!

[Michelle DeFields-Gambrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread this book from my childhood and realized why it was one of my favorites! It is so well written and plotted. Honestly, I’m not sure why it isn’t considered a modern classic.

[Threse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so excited to find the title and author of this book! I LOVED it as a kid (and yes, I'm sure it caem from the Scholastic Book Club) but could not for the life of me remember the name. Thanks, google!

Great little fantasy read for girls.

[Eliz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this little book on the third floor bookshelf in my mother's attic & had to re-read immediately as I remembered it was one of my childhood favorites. Forty years later and it still makes the list. Sweet story with just enough excitement to keep it interesting and children wanting to read.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as a kid and loved it! Becca, I bet Natalie would like it. Or maybe it's for older kids more like 12 years old. I can't remember.

[Whitney Oaks · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books when I was younger. Read and reread this book until the cover was almost coming off.

[Lisa]

The Mysterious Shrinking House by Jane Louise Curry (1973)

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book as a child...great for stirring up the imagination. I hope to find it to purchase online and introduce it to my own daughter.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping it would be darker than it turned out to be.