The Borrowers

by Mary Norton

Book Overview

The Borrowers--the Clock family: Homily, Pod, and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Arrietty, to be precise--are tiny people who live underneath the kitchen floor of an old English country manor. All... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0152099905
• ISBN13: 9780152099909
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Odyssey Classics
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.6"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

Not hardback like I ordered

The book is in fair condition, with a small piece of the cover missing. Overall, it just looks old and tired. That wouldn't bother me so much if I had ordered the paperback but I ordered the hardback version. Disappointed!

The amazing Borrowers!

The Borrowers are classic reading fun and adventure at any age, as long as you have creative imagination. Truely these books are not just children's books. I first read some at the age of about 12 yrs.. My mother would check them out at our town library and we would both read them. Now I am 74yrs young and I am reading ALL of them again. . the long gap in time I find the Borrowers are still as fresh and even more enjoyable reading. The little people are almost like people we may know , with trials and challenges as stressful or as joyful as we face in today's world. Love, friendship, fears and loss are part of the Borrowers world too, and we can relate to them at any age,5 to 95! Yes this is make believe, but don't pass it up at any age.. Read with your children or read for the pure pleasure of sharing a life with the Borrows.. You will be better off for knowing them.. If you gain their trust you will welcome them into your imagination!🏡 thumbs up!

The Borrowers - a many layered classic

The Borrowers is a book for losers. Not the modern kind of loser, but people like me who are always losing stamps and pins and pens. The book tells the story of Arrietty Clock and her parents, tiny people who live beneath the floor of an old house and `borrow' the things they need from the humans who live in the house above. A postage stamp becomes a painting for their wall, pins become knitting needles. Even Arrietty's parents' names - Pod and Homily - are borrowed. Life has never been easy for the borrowers, but now times are changing for the worse. The Sink family in the scullery, the Broom Cupboards, the Rain-Pipes and even Uncle Hendreary and his family have emigrated. Only the Clock family remain, living in fear of Mrs Driver, the housekeeper upstairs. When Pod comes home and says that a boy is living upstairs and that the boy has `seen' him, Pod's wife, Homily, is thrown into panic. Arrietty, however, is intrigued. While her parents cling to the dubious safety of the life they know, Arrietty wonders about the world outside and dreams of adventure. She persuades her reluctant parents to let her accompany her father on his borrowing expeditions. On her first venture out, she meets the boy upstairs. A dangerous friendship develops. Meanwhile, Mrs Driver stalks the borrowers, full of the sort of cruelty Roald Dahl would have been proud to create. It is only with the boy's help that Arrietty and her parents narrowly escape Mrs Driver's attempts to destroy them. At the end of the book, Arrietty faces the dangerous adventure of emigration. Like all great books for the young, The Borrowers can be read as an enthralling story of adventure, but also contains many layers of meaning. Mary Norton's creation of the tiny race of borrowers is an imaginative achievement in itself, but she does not stop there. She gives poignance to her tale by telling it through the voice of the boy's sister, now an old lady, who tells us at the start that her brother has long since grown up and died a `hero's de!ath' on the North-West frontier. The old lady seems to believe her brother's tale of the borrowers, and yet at the end of the book she provides evidence to suggest that the borrowers may have been nothing but a product of her brother's imagination. The reader is left wondering about reality and truth. On another level, in the relationship between the borrowers and the human world, parallels with the misunderstandings and confusions which occur between different cultures can be discerned. The uncertainties the borrowers face and their final exile mirror the plight of our world's increasing number of displaced people. Long after the book is finished, the characters and the questions their story raises reverberate around the mind. The Borrowers is a book which will fascinate, intrigue and entertain.