The Adventures of Wee Ennui is the debut children’s novel from Two Plum Press publisher Andrew Barton.

This is a “preview edition” put together after the manuscript was completed, published for the purposes of sharing the work with enthusiastic readers in advance of pursuing wider publication. Writing the novel happened in a span of 8 years, with a several-years pause while writing and promoting The Myrtlewood Cookbook.

It is the story of a girl looking for either her “real” family or a family to choose, who is not afraid.

420 pages. Excerpt, revealing the scope of the adventure, below the gallery.

excerpt, pages 334-336:

“When you asked for my address here, I just thought it was an unrealistic fantasy. But here you are!”

“I did meet you while stowing away on a cruise ship meant for fancy old ladies,” she pointed out, by way of reply.

“Indeed. You’re a capable girl. I’m sorry I’m in such a state. And I need to leave tomorrow.”

“Come out and have a cup of tea,” offered Harold.

“Yes, do–” said Wee Ennui, “might revive you a bit.”

They sat at the oval kitchen table and drank tea from those same little glasses. Harold brought out some bread and some honey for them to nibble as well. Archie was perking up as he sipped his tea. “So, you’ve come a long way. Tell us where you’ve been and what has happened!” He said this while tucking into more and more bread and honey, with a wide eyed look, eager to hear her story.

“Well,” started Wee Ennui, speeding up as she went along, “First I met a very nice lady with purple carrots at the farmer’s market where I last saw you, and she took me home once she found out I had nowhere to go. She was very nice– lived in a little cottage, ate nice things, could have been my new mom really– but soon I was picking sloes by the river and I fell in, just barely making it onto a boat that took me all the way to the White Cliffs of Dover. I knew how to stow away now, so I did, in someone’s car– which drove onto a ferry heading to the Netherlands. I got off with them, too, they were very nice once they discovered me. Gave me a ride to Utrecht and everything. Then I took the train past all the windmills, up to Amsterdam, where I met a girl my age and spent some time with her and her mom. They live in a houseboat, which is a very nice combination of a boat and a house. They could have been my new family too, I suppose. But one day I got a weird urge and so I took off with a wheel of cheese on a bicycle. A man found me on the side of the road with a car full of coffee he was taking all the way to Finland. Finland sounded nice, and I certainly had nowhere else to go, so I went the whole way. His sister was very nice too. But it turned out that my evil Not-Aunt Verbena, who I told you about before? From Alabama– well, she was there. She tied up the nice man’s sister and pretended to be her so she could catch me! I’m too smart for that, though, so I knocked her into the broom closet and escaped into the forest riding a reindeer. It was COLD, that forest. I took a very cheap bus called a Euroline all the way from Finland down to France, because with the weird winding route I knew Verbena wouldn’t be able to follow me. In Paris I met another girl and her mom– where are all their dads? I’m just now wondering that. Silly dads. Don’t know when they’ve got nice families right in front of them! Well anyway this girl was very nice and her mom really didn’t care what we did. We went to the Louvre by ourselves and we met a rascally boy who touched the Mona Lisa! And we all ran away. It was AWESOME. I spent some more time with the girl and her mom, actually the boy too– he had Dads, actually–and all of them could have been my family too, I suppose, but when we got to the train station the girl gave me a bunch of her mom’s money and told me I could take the Orient Express if I wanted to and looking at the train, it was just so beautiful and mysterious, I just kind of felt like I had to. The train was so nice, and it took me all the way through France and Germany and Austria and Czechoslovakia, and into Hungary. When I got to Budapest, I just felt like I had to get off and see things in the open air again. Everything was like a castle and they had all these warm baths- hot water just bubbling out of the earth. It was AMAZING. I wandered all around and around and eventually I met a nice old man in a café, from England, who had been there when he was young and liked to come back. We visited the house where he used to stay and there we found a boy who went to school on the other side of the city. He was part of this club, and his grandfather had written a book about the club, and anyway it was very complicated, this club– and they had a fight going with another club that had been going for over a hundred years! I got to join the club. First girl to ever join this club, and I paved the way for others to join too. With the extra power from the girls, we defeated the other club- at least for a time. I could have joined the boy’s family, or the old man’s, or the boys and girls from the club, I suppose. But it didn’t feel quite right, at least not quite right in a forever way, so I got back on the train and rode out through the countryside into Romania. Romania is very beautiful and strange, I must say, with the white domes in the forest and all. I didn’t get out at Bucharest, but I did get out at Calarasi. There I just wandered the dirt roads until I met a group of traveling vagabonds, with so many children and very disinterested adults. I liked being with all the kids, it felt like it was with the escaped- Scout Wastrels in the woods so long ago. One kid was the nicest, she is a girl my age. We walked through the rest of Romania and into Turkey, all the way up to the Theodosian wall. She took me into the city, by the cover of the falling night– just last night, actually, and we had many adventures. All the way until a little over an hour ago, when she put me on the ferry to cross the Bosphorus into Anatolia, so that I might find you.”