The International House of Dereliction by Jacqueline Davies EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Jacqueline Davies
- Language: English
- Genre: Children’s Paranormal, Occult & Supernatural Books
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Alice’s mother owned a podium. This was not the strangest thing she
owned, but it was by far the most eye-catching. The podium dominated the
living room—all the other furniture seemed to bow down before it. Even
the fireplace, which you would think would assert itself as the hearth of the
home, crouched humbly, weighted down by dozens of framed photographs
of the family on both sides. The Cannolis, Alice’s mother’s family, were all
extraordinarily tall and thin and shaped like bendy straws with legs. The
Potchniks, Alice’s father’s family, were all short and round and rather hairy,
resembling happy bears who had eaten their fill of honey.
Alice, who was just ten and still becoming who she would be, had
gotten the best from both gene pools. She was smart and fearless, like her
mother, and good-natured and a whiz at fixing things, like her father. But
whether she would develop a laugh as loud as a Potchnik or learn to do a
backbend like a Cannoli still remained to be seen. She was, after all, very
much her own person, and as her mother often said, “Time will tell.”
Alice had been home when the podium arrived. She had opened the
front door and there was Dave, who worked in the college’s facilities
management department.
“Hiya, Alice,” said Dave, leaning on the podium. “Your mom asked me
to bring this over. We were about to chuck it in a dumpster, but she said to
bring it here instead.”
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Alice, her face lighting up as she looked
at the scarred and battered wood. She was a girl whose curiosity had not
been dulled by too many math worksheets and required reading. Her
parents believed in unschooling, which meant she didn’t go to school;
instead, life was school. She had her days to herself and could allow her
mind to wander wherever it wanted to go. She could read or explore or
experiment or daydream. In the evening, her parents would ask, with great
excitement and interest, what she had learned that day, and Alice would
give a detailed account of everything she had discovered: that the planets
rotate around the sun and that moons rotate around the planets, that algae
and fungus have a symbiotic relationship that creates lichen, that Henry
David Thoreau had bought way too many nails to build his small cabin in
the woods because he was such a bad carpenter. Also, that Thoreau took his
laundry to his mother’s house to get washed, so why was he considered a
model of self-reliance?
“He should have put that in his book,” said Alice hotly over a dinner of
spicy rice and beans. “I don’t think he would have sold so many copies!”
Then Alice told her parents that she wanted to build a house in their
backyard, and they said “Of course!” with great enthusiasm and love. But
she hadn’t yet found the time to do it because there was so much to learn
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