The Land of Decoration

AUTHOR: Grace McCleen
PUBLISHED: 2012
GENRE: Fiction

The Land of Decoration sounds like fun, right?  A witty novel on the lives of interior designers, or how a jewelry maker found love, or maybe even how one pre-school teacher used dried macaroni and glitter to teach her young charges the importance of learning.

Yeah, not so much.

Judith McPherson is 10 years old and awkward.  It’s a social situation that isn’t helped by the fact that her father belongs to a group of Christians who believe that Armageddon is nigh – like, any-day-now nigh.*  The majority of her time is spent proselytizing their unenthusiastic neighbors and pondering the Bible.  Her father, suffering from an extreme case of stiff upper lip Brittishness and the loss of his wife, takes little note of the pre-teen troubles of his only child.  It’s a lot for a little kid to handle.  To deal with it all, Judith builds herself a new world, quite literally: made of scraps of fabric and pop tops and a hundred other different kinds of trash, the Land of Decoration is a vast landscape so big she often must climb the furniture to navigate her room. 

The Land of Decoration is just for fun. That is, until she starts to use it for other means.  See, she needs a miracle to avoid a Monday-morning meeting with a bully and a dirty toilet, and isn’t above appealing to the Almighty for help.  She even creates a snowstorm of cotton balls and tissue paper in the Land of D to show God what she was looking for.  If He could build one just like it, she would be eternally grateful.

The thing is… it works.

The freak snowstorm in October convinces the 10-year-old that she is a miracle worker.  When God starts speaking to her – well, that just seals the deal.  She suddenly has the power to make things happen.  All she has to do is change up the Land of Decoration to suit her needs.  Make a little orange cat, and her neighbor’s kitty comes back home.  Take away the cotton balls, and the snow stops.  Smush a little pipe cleaner figure… well, she wouldn’t be that.  She doesn’t want to abuse her powers, after all.  She is completely unprepared, therefore, by the repercussions of her actions.  God, who insists that she not speak of this to anyone - is of little help, leaving Judith with the overwhelming question of how to make it all stop.

It’s a strange story, and yet, it works.  Judith makes perfect sense, given her surroundings – raised without a mother by a very religious, very distant father, she is left with only a rampant internal world.  McCleen’s prose sometimes gets a little overwrought – Judith spends a lot of time sweating and hyperventilating and experiences such swings in body temperature that the reader might begin to wonder if she has a neurological disorder.  Perhaps more importantly, despite McCleen’s descriptions, the Land of Decoration remains hard to picture.  McCleen seems to have sensed this, and thus includes a few little recipes for creation – how to make a little figurine, for example, right down to the white-out face.  Unfortunately, the recipes just seem to emphasis the mystery of it all. 

In the end, the “big” questions – is she speaking to God? If she isn’t, then whose voice is that? – become almost secondary, which is good, because they don’t get answered.  The only thing that really matters is Judith, and how she will find her way back.  Thankfully, when it comes to her young protagonist, McCleen makes the picture perfectly clear.

LENGTH: 320 pages

MAINSTREAM OR NOT?: No, Armageddon is generally not a big public concern.
SO, SHOULD I READ IT OR NOT?: Yes.  Unlike so many other fictional kids nowadays, Judith is not just bearable, but someone you can feel for.

*Don’t-make-plans-for-next-week nigh.  Don’t-shop-for-more-than-a-few-days-worth-of-food nigh.  Don’t-bother-to-mow-the-lawn nigh.  I could go on for days. Except, you know, limited-amount-of-days nigh.