It's inadvisable to begin a novel with both an unusual event and a weird setting

With the end of the semester, I went back to work on my whimsical children's novel (no joke, I am currently writing the 32nd draft of the first chapter). And I realized that one of my problems was that my first chapter contained both: a) a pretty atypical setting; and b) an event that was, for that setting, fairly out-of-the-ordinary. And this sets up a…