Through the garden gate
May. 25th, 2023 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I was feeling very worn down and deflated today, for a variety of reasons — the chief of which being the seemingly neverending set of things in the house which need fixing or changing. These are all the sorts of things that in a rental property I would have treated like endurable petty annoyances, and things that I couldn't change, but now that we own the house feel like an endless stream of wrongness that needs to be worked on until they're fixed.
And then a box of my old books from Australia arrived in the mail. You may recall that I spent some time when I was back in April clearing through the bookshelves in my old room in my mum's flat. She has been sending everything that survived the cull in batches — first my old paper journals, photo albums, and various other things like that, and now the books. This first box was mainly filled with middle grade books, which to be honest is about where my brain is at.
So I picked up six of these books — a series of illustrated children's portal fantasies, each no longer than about 90 pages — and read them all during my lunch break. The editions I have, from the mid-'90s, are written by 'Mary-Anne Dickinson,' but as my family suspected at the time, this was a nom de plume for Australian author Emily Rodda (itself a nom de plume for Jennifer Rowe), and Goodreads lists the books as being written by Rodda. The other amusing change is that the six I have were the extent of the series (named in the books as the 'Storytelling Charms Series'; each book came with a little charm that attached to a charm bracelet, which I also found when clearing out my room), but the series on Goodreads is listed as the 'Fairy Realms Series' and seems to have four further books and a number of short stories.
In any case, these are extremely undemanding children's portal fantasy — a little girl named Jessie discovers that her beloved grandmother is the ruler of a magical realm who left this otherworld to marry her human artist husband, the gateway to this realm is in her grandmother's garden, and Jessie travels into the otherworld in each book to solve various low-stakes magical crises which resonate with various low-stakes human crises she's having at home. The books are sweet, and warm-hearted, and ultimately what they're really about is the fact that for many children, grandmothers are a bit magical, and visiting the grandparents' house is a bit like travelling to a special fairy otherworld — at least if your grandparents are kind people. It certainly brought up warm and nostalgic memories for me of visiting my maternal grandparents, who were wonderful and open-hearted people (and, as I discovered as a teenager and in adulthood, open-minded and never afraid to reevaluate the norms and values of their youth and early adulthood), which is the most human kind of magic.
And then a box of my old books from Australia arrived in the mail. You may recall that I spent some time when I was back in April clearing through the bookshelves in my old room in my mum's flat. She has been sending everything that survived the cull in batches — first my old paper journals, photo albums, and various other things like that, and now the books. This first box was mainly filled with middle grade books, which to be honest is about where my brain is at.
So I picked up six of these books — a series of illustrated children's portal fantasies, each no longer than about 90 pages — and read them all during my lunch break. The editions I have, from the mid-'90s, are written by 'Mary-Anne Dickinson,' but as my family suspected at the time, this was a nom de plume for Australian author Emily Rodda (itself a nom de plume for Jennifer Rowe), and Goodreads lists the books as being written by Rodda. The other amusing change is that the six I have were the extent of the series (named in the books as the 'Storytelling Charms Series'; each book came with a little charm that attached to a charm bracelet, which I also found when clearing out my room), but the series on Goodreads is listed as the 'Fairy Realms Series' and seems to have four further books and a number of short stories.
In any case, these are extremely undemanding children's portal fantasy — a little girl named Jessie discovers that her beloved grandmother is the ruler of a magical realm who left this otherworld to marry her human artist husband, the gateway to this realm is in her grandmother's garden, and Jessie travels into the otherworld in each book to solve various low-stakes magical crises which resonate with various low-stakes human crises she's having at home. The books are sweet, and warm-hearted, and ultimately what they're really about is the fact that for many children, grandmothers are a bit magical, and visiting the grandparents' house is a bit like travelling to a special fairy otherworld — at least if your grandparents are kind people. It certainly brought up warm and nostalgic memories for me of visiting my maternal grandparents, who were wonderful and open-hearted people (and, as I discovered as a teenager and in adulthood, open-minded and never afraid to reevaluate the norms and values of their youth and early adulthood), which is the most human kind of magic.
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Date: 2023-05-25 06:47 pm (UTC)"for many children, grandmothers are a bit magical" -- I definitely relate! :)
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Date: 2023-05-26 07:58 am (UTC)Truly an agonizingly relatable sentence. We're in the middle of this (of course), with an extra dose of having our first family visit this weekend so want things to be just right.
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Date: 2023-05-26 11:25 am (UTC)I hope the family visit goes well.
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