The Linnet's Tale - Softcover

Willard, Dale C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743224981 ISBN 13: 9780743224987

Publisher: Touchstone, 2002

Synopsis

Share the romance, drama, and adventure of small-town life among the mice of Tottensea Burrows -- as told by a very entertaining bird In the garden of an English cottage live the lovable, highly literate field mice of Tottensea Burrows -- Peebles Carryforth the Mayor; Opportune Baggs, the inventor; the Fieldpea family with their three beautiful daughters, Grenadine, Almandine, and Incarnadine; the widow Proserpine Pockets and her young son Farnaby; and Merchanty Swift, the bold mouse who becomes the hero of The Linnet's Tale. Brokenhearted when his beloved Pleasings Tatterstraw runs away with a charming French mouse, Merchanty, a daring trader, goes on to become a mouse of means. But when Tottensea Burrows is threatened, he risks everything to rescue his friends and neighbors. In the midst of danger, will he find love again? Full of wit and sparkle and irresistible linguistic inventiveness, The Linnet's Tale delivers pure enjoyment.

About this title

About the Author

Dale C. Willard has worked in many fields, from engineering to motion pictures, and even took a turn as a high school English and history teacher. He is the author of My Son, My Brother, My Friend. He and his wife live in Colorado.

Reviews

This very, very British fable about a village of field mice falls into a fictional no-man's-land: too sophisticated for children, too unsophisticated for adults. The narrator is a linnet (a small finch common to England) raised by a field mouse family in a village called Tottensea Burrows, which is inhabited by mice who have excruciatingly cute and cumbersome names: Opportune Baggs, Adverbial Quoty, Clementine Nicklepenny, among dozens of others. Mr. Fieldpea has three eligible daughters, Grenadine, Incarnadine and Almandine, whose romantic interests provide some diversion. Merchanty Swift becomes the village's hero by dint of some clever actions. Most of the plot concerns the rodents' unexciting day-to-day existence, including their leisure activities in a bookshop and a bar. Suspense is provided by a cat that comes to the neighborhood, and by a band of pirates (rats and voles) in search of a valuable artifact. One would expect the mice to band together and heroically defeat the cat but, disappointingly, they simply move to a new location. While occasionally droll, the narrative is neither charming nor humorous. Willard consistently tells rather than shows, and though he attempts an anthropological resonance, the characters are altogether too fey to stimulate the reader's interest. B&w line drawings.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Linnet Waterford Hopstep is the ideal observer and narrator to tell the tale of the field mice of Tottensea Burrows. After falling out of his nest as a baby and being orphaned by a stoat, he is taken in by a family of mice who teach him to fly. He describes the flourishing Tottensea Burrows, where field mice Mr and Mrs. Fieldpea and their daughters Almandine, Grenadine, and Incarnadine entice customers to the Bookish Mouse shop by serving tea each day at four; Merchanty Swift finds whatever stuff his fellow creatures want; inventor Opportune Baggs perfects his mousewriter; and the entire mouse community, located near a cottage, dines happily on birdseed, vegetables from the garden, and food from the dog's dish. Eating dog food raises ethical issues, then leads to upheaval of a catastrophic sort that in the end proves fortuitous, for even field mice should be true to their nature. These are endearing creatures, and their story is a charming one for all ages. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: Grenadine Learns the Language

Grenadine Fieldpea used to conjugate field mouse verbs, aloud, while sitting at the breakfast table, swinging her legs under the chair and waiting for her mother to finish boiling the oatmeal. It sounded like this:

I will eat porridge
you will eat porridge
he will eat porridge

we will eat porridge
you will eat porridge
they will eat porridge

I will be eating porridge
you will be eating porridge
And so on.

Grenadine's sisters, Almandine and Incarnadine, would beg their mother to make her stop doing this and, indeed, at some point -- as no one could likely parse an entire field mouse verb before breakfast! -- her mother would be forced to do exactly that, saying something like "Stop conjugating, Grenadine, and eat your porridge. It's getting quite cold. And besides, dear, you've got the future perfect progressive all in a muddle. It's 'I will have been eating' not 'I will have been having eaten.'"

Grenadine was, all her life, a quite linguistic mouse. But when she was little, this characteristic tended toward extremes. At one point, for example, when her interest had turned a little away from conjugating verbs and more toward acquiring vocabulary, she began to run across words in the dictionary that she thought very fine and that needed to be more evident in field mouse usage. She thereupon undertook, herself, a small crusade to this end. The first method she tried was simply to quote the definition of the words to everyone, in turn, giving full particulars, and at the end, an exhortation. Mr. and Mrs. Fieldpea found it pleasant enough to be accosted a few times a day by a small mouse holding a large book who would read out something like:

SIMULTANEOUS adjective: existing or occurring at the same time. See COINCIDENT

followed by "Please use that as soon as possible." Or

SUBSEQUENT adjective: following in time, order, or place. See SUCCEEDING.

"Before lunch, if you can. Thanks."

Almandine found this less pleasant than her parents did and would often say, "Oh, Grenadine, stop!" while Incarnadine, finding it less pleasant still, might respond with something more along the lines of "Go away. See LEAVE."

At length, Grenadine abandoned the first method because it didn't seem to her to be doing any good. Although Mr. Fieldpea would often try to help out at meals with "I shall have some of that gooseberry jam SIMULTANEOUSLY with my toast, please," or "I noticed some STRIATIONS today -- lengthwise, along a stick," and Mrs. Fieldpea would respond with "How PICTURESQUE that must have been," Grenadine's sisters were not being improved in any lexical respect that she could observe. Whatsoever!

Her second method was to ply her chosen word in every conversation one could conceivably work it into -- thus to teach by example. This was sometimes more difficult than others, of course, depending on the word. It was no trouble at all to find ways to use a word like "ingenious." Everything in the Fieldpea burrow simply became ingenious. Its floor was an ingenious floor, its walls were ingenious walls, and it had an ingenious candlestick which held an ingenious candle. But contorting ordinary conversation into something that could accommodate casual references to a word like "proteinaceous," on the other hand, became an awful thing indeed.

For some reason not well understood, Grenadine got quite insistent about this particular word and let it be known that, although she was getting no help whatsoever in her effort to raise PROTEINACEOUS up, they would all of them do well to get on with it as she was not going to permit the DEMISE of attention to this poor word, allowing it, therefore, to be RELEGATED to its customary OBSCURITY -- "demise" and "obscurity" being words from the previous day and "relegate" from one or two days before that.

"Proteinaceous," then, provoked a crisis.

But Grenadine was lucky in mothers, having got one who was wise and loving and who knew a thing or two about words, herself. When the search for protein references began to threaten with tension -- if not tears -- almost every Fieldpea conversation in which Grenadine was involved, her mother said to her, "Try 'pertinacious' dear. It sounds almost as good and it's much easier. It means perversely persistent; stubbornly unyielding or tenacious. See OBSTINATE. Try using it right away, then." And though Grenadine said she couldn't think of a way to work that in, everyone noticed the SUBSEQUENT DEMISE of the vocabulary crusade.

Mr. and Mrs. Fieldpea cheered up a bit when Grenadine turned to poetry. "Ah, sweet poesy," they thought to themselves. Here would be something less technical -- more flowing and generous. But then they remembered that versification can be quite rigorous. Then they remembered, with increasing unease, that, in fact, it absolutely bristles with mechanical aspects. Grenadine found these right away.

The study of meter she liked very much. She could be heard around the burrow explaining metrical things to others: "Ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM. That's iambic, you see, ta-TUM being an iamb. TUM-ta, on the other hand, is a trochee. Whereas an anapest..."

What was additionally trying was that she would point out interesting features of one's meter in conversation. If Almandine were to say to her, "Why are you wearing that old dress?" Grenadine might respond with, "That's two dactyls and a spondee, Almandine!" And if Almandine, in turn, said something back like "Will you stop doing that every time I say something!" Grenadine would probably observe that that line contained a molossus in the first foot.

As bad as Grenadine's meter period was, however, the rhyming period was worse. It started with something like "Grenadine, it's time for tea" being answered by "That is such good news to me," or "It's your turn to clean the room" by "You were told that, dear, by whom?" -- harmless enough, one might think. But I assure you that such a practice, continued indefinitely, is very likely to provoke irritation -- in sisters, for example. Now I think of it, especially in sisters.

When Almandine's

I can't find my other sock

was answered by Grenadine's

Have you looked beneath that rock?

Almandine would ask, of course, "What rock?"

Grenadine, searching less for the sock than for some decent rhymes, would reply,

Or, if a rock cannot be found
then try the other way around.

Almandine, then, who, in her childhood, tended more toward literal thinking and less toward the poetical, would turn around!

This would move Grenadine to say,

No, no! Please exercise your wit
If there's no sock
beneath the rock
Perhaps the rock is under it.

"What rock?" Almandine would reply. "There's no rock!"

Grenadine, by now having completely lost interest in the rock, it having served its purpose in the scheme of rhymes, would move on to other aspects of the problem at hand:

If one were careful with one's clothes
one shouldn't lose them, I suppose.

This last couplet would be lost on Almandine, however, who, by this time, would be on her way to the kitchen to ask her mother to make Grenadine stop saying there was a rock when there most certainly WASN'T ONE!

Mrs. Fieldpea became increasingly worried about Grenadine's excesses and their effect on family life. While realizing that her daughter might have some talent in things linguistic and might well, indeed, have a future in the field, the incessant squabbling and chaos which this talent was now causing, conjoined with the social obtuseness -- and blank obstinacy! -- of Grenadine, herself, was distressing to her. She would sometimes discuss the matter with Mr. Fieldpea in the evenings.

"What shall we do about Grenadine, dear?" she might say, over her needlepoint -- the figure of a large crimson radish stitched upon a ground of pale amber.

"Hmm. Grenadine," Mr. Fieldpea would probably reply. But he might say it very slowly while not putting his newspaper down from in front of his face quite as promptly as Mrs. Fieldpea would have liked. She, however, would overlook this, for reasons which I shall presently explain. At length, he would put his newspaper down, of course, and then, with an expression on his face not unlike that of a mouse awakened from a deep sleep, he would blink one or two times, and, with admirable determination, focus his eyes directly upon Mrs. Fieldpea, who -- he would then realize -- was sitting in a chair right there in the room with him! Having focused, he would say, as if he were trying to recall something, "What shall we do about Grenadine?" This would be followed by a brief pause after which he would say, "Yes."

Mrs. Fieldpea, not looking up from the radish, would then notice, pleasantly, that Mr. Fieldpea had joined her on the very same planet which she was now inhabiting. But I must hasten to say that, very far from being irritated by this slight delay in her husband's response, she had learned to be flattered by it. Now, let me see if I can explain that.

Mrs. Fieldpea, you see, knew that her husband was not inclined to think about several things at once, as she was like to do. Mr. Fieldpea thought about one thing at a time. But he thought VERY DEEPLY. And she considered that he did it exceedingly well. In fact, Mrs. Fieldpea thought this inclination to deep thinking somewhat superior to her own. I, personally, am not at all sure that it was superior. But she thought it so and I count that rather splendid -- for her to think that, I mean -- the more so since he had always admired her for her ability to move effortlessly from one necessary line of thought to another.

In any event, Mrs. Fieldpea knew that for Mr. Fieldpea to leave off thinking about what he was reading in his newspaper in order to attend to what she was asking him to think about at that moment required a certain deliberate adjustment of his interior processes. And she felt...well, rather honored that he undertook such an effort for her, if you see what I mean. But it did require a small space of time, that adjustment.

One evening -- after such an adjustment -- Mr. Fieldpea said, "I've been thinking about Grenadine and the others, as a matter of fact. Today, actually."

"Really?" said Mrs. Fieldpea, interested.

"Yes," he continued. "It occurred to me that siblings are very useful to one another. It's as if one were to rattle small stones about in a box until they were all of them quite smooth. Do you think that reasonable?"

"Yes, I believe I do," she said.

He went on. "It's quite wonderful in its effect -- this rattling about -- but it does, at times, set up something of a small racket, you see."

"Hmm. Yes. Of course it would," she said, frowning thoughtfully. "We simply will have a bit of noise, then."

"A bit, yes. But only within reasonable limits," he emphasized, picking up his newspaper. Then he put it back down and added this thought: "So we mustn't give up hope, I think."

"No. Certainly not," said Mrs. Fieldpea, just putting the last crimson stitch in the tip of the radish near the very bottom edge of the lovely amber ground.

And generally they don't. Give up hope, I mean. Field mice.

Neither do they, as parents, moreover, leave all the smoothing to the other small stones. When one day, Mr. Fieldpea said:

"Grenadine, enough of this rhyming business for now!" and his daughter answered with:

"Do you mean a rough amiss timing is this somehow?" (which, if one works it out, was quite remarkable, but very disobedient) -- it cost her some desserts.

Being rhymed at by a small tenacious field mouse will not, of course, cause anyone actual physical harm. Disobedience, however, will cause all manner of harm to that small tenacious field mouse, herself -- and Mr. and Mrs. Fieldpea knew it. All considerations of Grenadine's talent or future had to be put aside until this issue of minding one's parents could be settled. It took a bit of their own tenacity for her mother and father to settle it, but, at length, it was settled. And due to such settling, Grenadine grew up a happier mouse -- easier to live with, and much better liked by her sisters. In fact, as they came of age, the Fieldpea girls were known in Tottensea Burrows not only for being beautiful and accomplished, but also for being practically inseparable.

Copyright © 2002 by Dale C. Willard

Edition details

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743224981
• ISBN 13: 9780743224987
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208