This enchanting tale follows a time-traveling umbrella on a quest for home and belonging. The author draws parallels to their own childhood struggles with dyslexia and longing for love, reflecting on themes of abandonment, family, and the search for a place called home.
The author says: – ” Pernickety Boo comes from a sorcerer’s book of time-traveling spells. The sorcerer is careless with the magic he has created and leaves Pernickety Boo on the Circle Line to go round and round until he is handed into the lost property office at Baker Street. There is in Pernickety a longing for that elusive place called home, a safe place without harm, free from cruelty, surrounded by four walls of love. Like Odysseus, that often takes a lifetime of searching. Even when you think, as Pernickety does, that he has found a home with his beloved Sylvie Moonshine, he isn’t sure that he will be wanted in the family when things go wrong.
Pernickety has a lot in common with me when small. I was an inconvenient child being severely dyslexic in a time when no one knew what dyslexia was. Without doubt that added to the sense of being completely lost, as well as my parents’ divorce. My brother and I were shunted between two stations: my father’s rather old-fashioned flat and my mother’s ultra-modern one. Neither place, I can honestly say, did I feel wholeheartedly wanted or ‘at home’. My brother fared slightly better, finding the home he loved with my stepmother. I longed to be loved by my mother and my stepfather. I was, to a certain extent, but the minute my sister was born when I was 11, my brother and I were seen by my mother and stepfather as irritants to what otherwise would’ve been a happy family of three. I think, rather like Pernickety Boo, for most of my life, I have been looking for home, longing to make a secure place with walls made of that rarest of substances: unconditional love.
As Pernickety Boo says, “Home, what a magical word. An H like a house, an O as round as a hug, an M for mums and an E for ever”. I believe many little people and not so little are all looking for the sunshine of the truly loved smile, a safe place in a worrying world.
The idea of Pernickety-Boo came to me when I was in the middle of writing another book. Unlike many of my ideas, this one came fully formed in the shape of an umbrella, called Pernickety Boo. Three things determined where and when the book would be set. The first was the lost property office at Baker Street, when it was still at Baker Street. Second was the Circle Line, when you could, if so desired, go round and round all day on it. Which meant it was set in a time before mobile phones.
Now all I had to do was let Pernickety Boo tell his story. What he had to say struck me as being at the heart of so many of us. The fear of being abandoned, of never being found again. That one would ever see or understand the magic in us. Every year, over 80,000 umbrellas are lost. They have been around (and been lost, I suppose) for over 4000 years. They are a brilliant piece of engineering that we hold in our hands and take completely for granted.
