A friend on Facebook mentioned this book the other day, and I remembered that I owned a copy but hadn’t read it. So I set out to remedy that neglect.

Cousins Craig and Jill inadvertently offend the new Queen of the City Under the Back Steps, and it turns out that Queen has the power to shrink them down to ant size and keep them in the city of ants until she’s good and ready to make them back into Mashers (what the ants call humans) again. The laws of Ant City are simple and immutable: Eat without being eaten, and protect the babies. Everything the ants do is in obedience to one or both of these laws. And contrary to Craig’s ideas about boys being stronger and more useful than girls, the ants don’t have much use for males of any species. Male ants in this city are not worth much as workers, and they only live for a day or two at the most.

In this transformational fantasy tale, the children don’t actually become ants, but they do shrink to the size of ants. They find that their human characteristics–only two legs to walk on, a lack of antennae to sense direction, and their need for sleep and rest—make them unfit for life in the City Under the Back Steps. However, when the red ants attack the City and carry off the babies, Craig and Jill are able to think of a way to bring the babies back and restore the City to stability and law-keeping. Will it be enough to make the Queen return them to their proper size?

Craig learns that not all societies think girls are “dumb”, and Jill and Craig both learn to accept other cultural norms even though they don’t really understand them. The ants are very different in their values and actions from humans, and Jill and Craig find that their pride in being human might be a somewhat overweening. After all, they only have brute strength and size to be proud of while the ants, ever busy and always law abiding, have a society that withstands repeated calamity and builds again.

This book is out of print and quite expensive to purchase online. First published in 1960, the story and the characters hold up quite well. If you can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a used copy, maybe you can get it from your library —or if you live in Houston, you can borrow it from my library.

The City Under the Back Steps would be a great story to read aloud during a study of insects and bugs or a study of different cultures. Different isn’t always wrong, and sometimes it pays to just listen and try to understand another person’s (or ant’s) thoughts and values. I’m trying to think of other books like this one, where a child enters an animal world and learns from the somewhat anthropomorphized animals who still carry some of the characteristics of animals as well:

In The Tune Is in the Tree by Maud Hart Lovelace, Annie Jo spends the day with the birds who use magic to shrink her to bird size and give her a pair of wings so that they can take care of her while her parents are away.

In The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli, the man-cub, lives in the forest with the wolf pack, but he is still a human boy. He learns to obey the law of the jungle, but eventually he turns to the community of village life.

T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone has Merlin the Wizard turn young Arthur or Wart into a fish, an ant, a badger, and a wild goose, and each transformation is meant to teach him a lesson about the role he will play as king someday. So, although Wart still thinks more or less like a human when he is transformed into various animals, he has the body and skills of the animal he becomes.

I know I’m forgetting other books like these. What other books have children entering the world of animals, transformed into the size or body or community of a member of the animal world? And what does the child learn from the experience?