Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Book Review - Mary Norton's The Borrowers

The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Published by: Harcourt, Brace and Company
Publication Date: 1952
Format: Hardcover, 180 Pages
To Buy

In our library we had a few volumes of books that were my mom's treasures from when she was little. There were many random volumes of sets cribbed from her siblings, but there was one whole set, Mary Norton's The Borrowers. This was easily my mother's favorite. One of my first bookstore memories is going to Pooh Corner on Monroe Street when The Borrowers Avenged was released. The memory is so vivid in my mind it's amazing that looking up the publication date that I was only four years old at the time! But I remember my mom's joy at a new volume in this beloved series published almost twenty years after the previous volume. I know at some point I read The Borrowers for school because our much loved copy has the outlines of a book report in it, but my biggest memory of this book is the fact that I totally thought it was real. I BELIEVED that Pod, Homily, and Arrietty lived in our walls. We had an old laundry shoot that had been closed off so when you opened the door in the downstairs bathroom there was a little platform, or as I thought, a little room just perfectly sized for the Clock family. My mom indulged me and let me build them furniture and even put food in there. I was so amazed that the food was always gone in the morning and my parents insisted they never took it. Of course that meant we had some really well fed mice for awhile, but I will always have this memory whereas those mice are long gone.

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