Rereading: THE LOST FARM by Jane Louise Curry

This book is connected to “Mindy’s Mysterious Miniature,” though it works fine on its own.

Pete MacCubbin lives with his father and grandmother on a remote farm in Summit County, Pennsylvania. Pete is twelve as the story opens, and doing a lot of the farm chores, caring for their sheep, cows, mules, and chickens, while Granny does a most of the gardening and all the cooking and cleaning. Pete’s father is pretty useless on the farm, he’s too busy collecting “treasures” from around the area. His junk-gathering obsession has given him the nickname Trashbin, and he’s often in trouble with the law. One day Trashbin steals from the wrong person, a temporary resident at the farm down the hill known as Professor Lilliput, who has a traveling caravan where he displays a miniature village. Trashbin breaks into the barn where the caravan is parked, and steals a miniature car from the exhibit. Up close, this car is amazingly detailed and realistic. The professor’s source for his attraction is actually real full-size houses and other items he’s shrunk with his Reducer machine. When Pete investigates the place himself, he meets a tiny girl named Samantha who was accidentally shrunk with her house, but before he can do anything to help her, the professor uses his Reducer to shrink the entire MacCubbin farm. The family wakes up one morning to find they and everything in the farm is about 10 percent of the size it should be.

Pete and Granny do the best they can with their new situation, but Trashbin seems befuddled and unable to cope. Pete makes attempts to get to the nearest town, but he always fails for one reason or another, and over time he and Granny learn to make do with what they have or can gather nearby. Years pass, and no one seems to know or care about the lost farm, until one day things begin to happen.

Entertaining, a good read. Recommended.

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