JANE LOUISE CURRY

"This lovely, larky, inventive fantasy is so logically, so completely imagined that it has created its own solid, believable world: you can enter it and move about in it... Professor Kurtz, Inventor, became L.L. Putt, Housenapper, when his malignant wart and growth reducer failed his medical purpose and shrank the town of Dopple instead, on the day of the county fair. Some of the inhabitants [are] left behind and still live, secretly, in Putt’s traveling exhibition: Lilliput, U.S.A. They survive ingeniously until young Mindy Hallam, buying what she thinks is a doll’s house at an auction, comes to join them and plans their triumphant escape. There is so much to praise here: character, suspense, sly, delicious humour... I found, as I came towards the end of THE HOUSENAPPER, that I was putting it on one side now and then to make it last longer, the way you keep the best bit on your plate till the end." --THE NEW STATESMAN, London