To break from the trend of grad studies posts, I want to recap the story of one of my favourite books. It is actually not unrelated to my studies, and I’ll explain why in my next post.

The Monster Garden (Vivien Alcock)

Amazon UK. I first read this book when I was eight or nine, a few years before I got a computer. In the days before I got a computer I used to read a lot of books. The story remained in my head and heart for years, and I love it; possibly because I empathise with Frankie: scientist family, geeky child. No test tube monsters though. Unfortunately…

The Monster Garden is about Frankie Stein, the alienated daughter of a genetic engineer. She is teased at school for having an unfortunate name, and because her father works in a secret lab. There are rumours that her father works on contentious  genetic engineering projects like germ warfare. Although he says he works for the good of mankind, Frankie and her brother are suspicious.

In order to find out what their father does, Frankie’s brother steals a test tube from the laboratory. They split the contents of the test tube between them.

Frankie takes her portion away on a glass slide, as her brother would not give her a petrie dish (“my monster would have to rough it”). Her brother also refuses to give her blood agar to feed the living cells, so Frankie uses her own blood. She leaves the glass slide on the windowsill.

Overnight, there is a terrific thunderstorm. Frankie wakes up to find bites taken out of a pot plant, and the culprit: a small monster that’s grown out of the cells on the slide.

The benevolent monster, Monnie, drinks with its foot, whistles, and brings Frankie small gifts. Frankie ends up loving the weird monster, in spite of its strangeness.

Monnie’s description:

I laughed. I expect I was hysterical. Or mad. I can’t think of any other reason why I did not scream and run from the room, like any sane person would have done. I just sat on my bed and watched it.

It was playing now. It sat in the upside-down lid as if in a boat, and rocked backward and forward until the lid tilted too far and tumbled it onto the floor. It seemed to enjoy this and did it several times.

Then it looked at me. Its eyes were very round and a clear, light crimson. Quite a pretty colour, really. It began twisting its slit of a mouth in a most ridiculous manner. Now it would bend the corners down until it looked like a croquet hoop; now into a capital U. Once it even managed to twist it into a figure eight. I couldn’t help laughing at it. It did not seem to know what a mouth was for. It never opened it, not once. Perhaps it was not a proper mouth at all.