I also enjoy the pictures of proportionately gigantic mushrooms hanging from the ceiling to dry.
Has anyone else read Jill Barklem's Brambly Hedge books? I still remember my mom coming home with the anthology collecting the four classic seasonal stories. She got it from Price Club (later absorbed by Costco - at any rate, the same store you'd go to for a giant vat of mayonnaise). I was already in high school, I think, but Barklem's stories and illustrations tapped into a vein of something potent that I'd been carrying around with me since childhood. Her mice are plump and quaint and cozy, and her illustrations somehow anticipate my almost hungry appreciation for fussy little secret spaces. Each family of mice lives in a hollowed out stump or tree, and Barklem shows you cross-sections of each of their tree-houses. You can look into all the tiny little rooms full of tiny little things! You can see the way all the little rooms are arranged!
Floor plans, my friends, floor plans! I thought my thing for floor plans had passed - in fact, the only reason I even consciously recognize a 'thing' for floor plans is that I was looking through my folders of old drawings just a couple of days ago, only to find floor plans, floor plans, floor plans, from, like, three separate epochs of my life - but the other day I read about the seventh level 'Mage's Marvelous Mansion' spell in my role playing book, and I immediately started planning what I would want mine to look like inside. LOL. (Extra-planar, fortified magic wizard house, perpetually stocked with delicious food for twelve companions! RAD! What better way to end a long day of adventuring than with a hot bath, a cozy bed, and a piping hot bowl of soup? Only I think 'mansion' would be a bit of a misnomer for mine. The half-orc aberrant sorceress raised by hobbits that I'm working on right now would much rather have a pokey, erratic country house - some kind of a cross between the hobbit holes of her home country, a college at Oxford, and Howl's Moving Castle. Even though she's at least six and a half feet tall, she feels most at home when the ceilings are a little lower than standard for half-orcs - or humans, for that matter; she likes to feel contained).
But, *hem*, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah. Brambly Hedge. So: there's at least one more book in the series beyond the four seasonal books, though I didn't know that until college, when a girl on my floor introduced me to, among other things, Kate Rusby and The Secret Staircase The latter is the only one of Jill Barklem's books that I have in my personal collection, and only because I happened on a copy at the annual library book sale here in town. But it probably boasts the single most staggering floor plan of them all, because it takes place in the Old Oak Palace and concerns the discovery by two mouse-children of, well, a Secret Staircase. Not just any Secret Staircase. Not a paltry split-level ranch house staircase of no consequence. A loooong, narrow staircase that - according to the cross-section of the palace that Barklem provides - spirals unnoticed past about five levels of palace rooms all routinely in use, only to arrive at a suite of dusty but magnificent rooms that have long been forgotten. There are several little bedrooms, a nursery, an awesome bathroom, and even a disused heraldic throne room from a bygone generation of Lordly Woodmice.
WHAT ARE ALL THE SECRET ROOMS DOING UP THERE? WHY ARE THEY SECRET? WHO BUILDS A PRIVATE THRONE ROOM AT THE END OF A LONG STAIRCASE THAT ORIGINATES IN THE ATTIC? What are those dark, dungeon-y vestibules off to the sides, at the staircase's only other two landings? (The actual story never even mentions these rooms). It's almost 4 friggin' a.m., and I'm UNABLE TO SLEEP, because I got the book down to look at some of the pictures, and now I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT FRIGGING SECRET STAIRCASE!
To be clear, it's not that I think the book simply does not make sense. That would probably be easier for me to live with. It's that I'm convinced THERE MUST BE SOME SORT OF PROPER EXPLANATION for these facts, and I'm mad that the book decides to end with a charming mid-winter feast rather than telling me what I want to know, LOL.
.
Floor plans, my friends, floor plans! I thought my thing for floor plans had passed - in fact, the only reason I even consciously recognize a 'thing' for floor plans is that I was looking through my folders of old drawings just a couple of days ago, only to find floor plans, floor plans, floor plans, from, like, three separate epochs of my life - but the other day I read about the seventh level 'Mage's Marvelous Mansion' spell in my role playing book, and I immediately started planning what I would want mine to look like inside. LOL. (Extra-planar, fortified magic wizard house, perpetually stocked with delicious food for twelve companions! RAD! What better way to end a long day of adventuring than with a hot bath, a cozy bed, and a piping hot bowl of soup? Only I think 'mansion' would be a bit of a misnomer for mine. The half-orc aberrant sorceress raised by hobbits that I'm working on right now would much rather have a pokey, erratic country house - some kind of a cross between the hobbit holes of her home country, a college at Oxford, and Howl's Moving Castle. Even though she's at least six and a half feet tall, she feels most at home when the ceilings are a little lower than standard for half-orcs - or humans, for that matter; she likes to feel contained).
But, *hem*, what was I talking about again? Oh yeah. Brambly Hedge. So: there's at least one more book in the series beyond the four seasonal books, though I didn't know that until college, when a girl on my floor introduced me to, among other things, Kate Rusby and The Secret Staircase The latter is the only one of Jill Barklem's books that I have in my personal collection, and only because I happened on a copy at the annual library book sale here in town. But it probably boasts the single most staggering floor plan of them all, because it takes place in the Old Oak Palace and concerns the discovery by two mouse-children of, well, a Secret Staircase. Not just any Secret Staircase. Not a paltry split-level ranch house staircase of no consequence. A loooong, narrow staircase that - according to the cross-section of the palace that Barklem provides - spirals unnoticed past about five levels of palace rooms all routinely in use, only to arrive at a suite of dusty but magnificent rooms that have long been forgotten. There are several little bedrooms, a nursery, an awesome bathroom, and even a disused heraldic throne room from a bygone generation of Lordly Woodmice.
WHAT ARE ALL THE SECRET ROOMS DOING UP THERE? WHY ARE THEY SECRET? WHO BUILDS A PRIVATE THRONE ROOM AT THE END OF A LONG STAIRCASE THAT ORIGINATES IN THE ATTIC? What are those dark, dungeon-y vestibules off to the sides, at the staircase's only other two landings? (The actual story never even mentions these rooms). It's almost 4 friggin' a.m., and I'm UNABLE TO SLEEP, because I got the book down to look at some of the pictures, and now I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THAT FRIGGING SECRET STAIRCASE!
To be clear, it's not that I think the book simply does not make sense. That would probably be easier for me to live with. It's that I'm convinced THERE MUST BE SOME SORT OF PROPER EXPLANATION for these facts, and I'm mad that the book decides to end with a charming mid-winter feast rather than telling me what I want to know, LOL.
.