I love this children's picture book, A Ruined House, by Mick Manning. On the first page the author writes: "This is my favorite house. I like it because it has gone to rack and ruin." For some reason, words like these capture me every time. I suppose I really should delve into why things that are falling apart at the seams enchant me so much.
Even the cover on this book is made to look like strips of torn paper. Or maybe it is torn paper!
I love the way in which this book tells exactly how an old house falls into rack and ruin, how the rain, the frost, the heavy snows slowly over the years trickled down, loosened the stones, collapsed the roof. I remember, when I first stepped into the condemned house that I talked about last week, how the whole house smelled so waterlogged, like a fishing pier, for the rain had dampened the insides. Here is the same thing from A Ruined House:
"First the rain dripped down the chimney. Everything turned damp. Fungus spread over the woodwork, and all the rooms began to smell of mold."
The house is a deserted farmhouse in a quiet valley in England. You have to cross "boggy fields" to get to it. You have to climb a fence. It's a stone house that dates back to the 16th century, and no one has lived in it now for a hundred years.
As Mick Manning quietly takes you into what is left of this old house, you find out that someone does live here after all. Many someones!
There are creepy-crawlies everywhere, fungi, nettles, butterflies, barn owls, swallows, and bats. One page imagines the people who lived here once, telling stories around a fire, but instead of ghosts, there are owls in the old fireplace now.
I love the quietness of this book. And many of the pages are like pages out of a journal, with pencil drawings of little creatures and penciled notes curving around the drawings. The illustrations are watercolor and pencil, and they capture the ethereal quality of a house that is slowly disintegrating.
There is a lovely reverence in this book for things that are old and disappearing and how new life simply carries on inside all the cracks and crevices.
This book is out of print, but there are four copies available in the Austin Public Library, so I am hoping you might be able to find it in your own library or find second-hand copies online.
It is published by Candlewick Press, and I am noticing that I love a lot of their children's picture books: The Last Train and The Big Big Sea, among others.
I seem to fall in love with books that are out of print ~ what is that all about?
I must get myself to the library to find brand-new children's books to tell you about before they are out of print, for if I happen to love them, I fear for their shelf-life. I always seem to reach for something that lies outside looking in, for the child who hangs back all alone on the playground, or the child who pulls his T-shirt over his head in class and sits there all hidden from view like a little ghost, or the house that has gone to rack and ruin.
To the library, then! And may you have a wonderful weekend finding whatever it is that you love the most!
.
