Little Boxes

Beneath the skin of the world we know, there lies another. Tiny humans live amongst us, in the mouseholes and crawlspaces of our world. Some live off of our refuse, wearing doll clothes and eating crumbs they steal from us. Far more, however, live much the same as we once did, in the vast plains and forests of the planet. Theirs is a dangerous world, far lower on the food chain, and yet they persist among predators, just as we once did. Bakari is a young hunter whose tribe hails from a wine cask in a wheatfield. After an attack from a garter snake leaves her family gravely wounded, Bakari sets out to retrieve life-saving medicine from a nearby farmhouse. Along the way, she runs into Ani, a teenage girl who lives under the floorboards. The two embark in their mouse-drawn carriage on a journey far beyond either’s expectations, travelling across what is, to them, a wide world of overgrown monsters, deadly poisons, and abandoned megastructures of long-vanished civilizations - But which, for you and me, is just another mile of midwestern countryside. Soon, they come upon a vast metropolis of junk, where the machines of giants are repurposed into engines of war. After all, the tools and refuse of larger humans aren’t the only things of theirs that can be repurposed. Long-discarded systems of authority can also be reused, with devastating consequences.

Little Boxes is a YA modern fantasy adventure novel. Inspired by novels like The Borrowers and films like N9ne and The Secret World of Arietty, it imagines the modern world from the perspective of the tiny creatures we share our planet with. What changes have we made to this world, that they must adapt to? If they could intelligently react to these changes, how might they? 

Manuscript currently in progress. Sample chapter available for download HERE (link to PDF)