It seems that people have always loved to see and handle small versions of themselves and others, and the objects that furnish their shared world. Four thousand years ago, the first shabti—a carved wooden miniature, typically of a servant—was set beside a deceased king in a late Old Kingdom tomb in Egypt, as it was believed that the deceased required just as much assistance in death as in life.
Tiny effigies have always provided diversion, distraction, understanding, and comfort. Miniature scenes in tombs, scale models, dollhouses, dioramas—each offers a bird’s-eye view that can clarify a complex situation. At the same time, peeking through tiny doors and windows can prompt a voyeuristic thrill or the melancholy feeling of being outside looking in. Either way, miniatures offer plenty of opportunities for interesting narratives.
What follows are a few of my favorites.
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Margaret Grace, Murder in Miniature
Murder in Miniature is the first of the five-book Miniature Mystery series by Margaret Grace, a pseudonym of mystery writer Camille Minichino. The heroine, Geraldine Porter, is a retired California schoolteacher who is as devoted to making dollhouses as she is to her level-headed ten-year-old granddaughter, with whom she shares a taste for adventure.
The book includes an appendix titled “Gerry’s Miniature Tips,” which offers suggestions for turning household items into dollhouse furnishings—and gives a glimpse into the author’s preoccupations beyond books. A former nun with a Ph.D. in physics who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the author was also a passionate miniaturist who made tiny scenes from her own mystery novels.
Elise Hooper, The Library of Lost Dollhouses
The Belva Curtis Lafarge Library is a landmark Beaux Arts building that conceals many secrets about its founder and her collections of books and art. One morning Tildy Barrows, the head curator, stumbles into one of these secrets: a hidden room where she discovers a collection of spectacular and perfectly preserved dollhouses—in which Tildy is shocked to find a miniature framed portrait of her own mysterious mother.
As Tildy unravels the connection between the artist who made the dollhouses, the wealthy benefactress who tucked them away, and her own family’s history, Hooper takes the reader on a whirlwind tour from fin-de-siècle Paris to the hospital wards of shellshocked soldiers returning from World War I. Through it all, author Elise Hooper shows women quietly keeping explosive secrets, shunning the limelight while holding everything together.
Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, this novel focuses on eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman, manipulated into marriage to a neglectful (and perhaps worse) wealthy merchant who brings her to the sumptuous yet conflict-riven home he shares with his gloomy sister. After he gives Nella a miniature version of their house as a wedding present, only the miniaturist whom Nella engages to help her furnish the house really understands what’s going on inside the household—but it’s not clear whose side he’s on.
In lucid strokes, Burton evokes the opulent world of the painter Johannes Vermeer, whose intimate and detailed interior scenes opened a window onto seventeenth-century Amsterdam and its powerful merchants. A treat for art lovers who adore the luminous paintings of the Dutch Masters, it’s also a meditation on feeling like an outsider while also being part of a family.
Rikki Ducornet, Netsuke
Akiko, an artist, and her psychoanalyst husband have a troubled marriage. Mainly the problem is the husband’s disastrous propensity to split his emotional life into compartments. While these had once been mostly figurative, he gets into real trouble when he divvies up his caseload, seeing his dull patients in an office he calls “Drear” while seducing his more exciting patients in a parallel enclosure he names “Spells.”
A novelist and visual artist whose Surrealist- and fairytale-inspired work has been overlooked by mainstream publishers, Ducornet excels at giving the details of ordinary life—a thermos of tea left out for an arriving spouse, a family fight in a restaurant—the sticky texture of a dream just verging on a nightmare.
In Netsuke, Akiko communicates her understanding of her husband’s predicament through gifts of Japanese seventeenth-century miniatures known as netsuke, carved figurines used to ornament a man’s kimono. Her gifts are attempts to revise her husband’s fairy-tale self-image as a miserable outsider, “a little child who was turned into an imp so nasty he was made very small and turned out into a bottle…which was a perfect fit.”
Mary Norton, The Borrowers
First published in 1952, this classic children’s novel, the first in a five-book series, introduces readers to the diminutive Clock family whose members live beneath the kitchen floor and “borrow” supplies from their unknowing patrons, the “human beans” who thunder heedlessly above them. These tiny boarders are geniuses at turning discarded human objects into appropriately sized essentials: old postage stamps become paintings, empty matchboxes find a second life as cupboards, and an old tin of pâté is reimagined as a bathtub.
Danger lurks everywhere, though. Any Borrower who is glimpsed by a human is never seen again—but the peril does not deter teenaged Arrietty from befriending the human boy who shares their home. She’ll do anything, risk anything, to feel less lonely—and what she finds is that she’s not the only one, large or small, who feels that way.
Diane Josefowicz, The Great Houses of Pill Hill
Described as “Martha Stewart Living meets The Maltese Falcon,” my second novel follows Hannah “Cookie” Cooke, an interior decorator with a side hustle making miniature crime scenes, as she is drawn into a real-life murder mystery when one of her clients is found dead under mysterious circumstances at his housewarming party. As she is lured ever more deeply into the secret lives of her town’s richest residents, she discovers how these secrets connect to a series of unexplained deaths at the local hospital.
But Cookie herself is hardly innocent—and as a lifelong resident of the same town, she has more than a few secrets of her own, and she has a bad habit of hiding them in plain sight, in her miniature dioramas. I enjoyed confecting this interior-design mystery, and I hope readers enjoy reading it just as much.
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