Molly Moon 1 – Molly Moon’s Incredible Book of Hypnotism

Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism by Georgia Byng is a mystery for 9 year olds, and its heroine is an orphan who learns how to make anyone do anything she likes.

What happens

Before any of that, though, your reader needs to meet Molly. She's in the bath at Hardwick House, daydreaming, when the door gets hammered on.

Miss Adderstone runs the orphanage and she has a tape measure. Molly's bath is forty centimetres deep. Baths are allowed to be ten. So that's no baths for three weeks, and a week as toilet monitor, cleaning them with her own toothbrush.

That is roughly how every day goes. Edna the cook was in the navy and serves rotten fish under a thick cheese sauce. The bigger children call Molly Zono, Drono and Bog Eyes. Only Rocky uses her actual name.

Molly copes by leaving. Not properly, just in her head. She flies up above the orphanage and the village and the country until the earth is a little ball underneath her. She also loves television adverts, because in adverts everybody is warm and has friends.

You spend the whole opening inside her head, and she's very funny about how grim it all is. She's also quietly convinced that she's ugly and useless and always in trouble, which is harder to read.

Then Rocky, of all people, tells her off. They're sheltering under a tree in the rain, skiving off cross-country, and he says out loud that she gives up on everything and he's sick of the trouble. She says something worse back.

That row is the thing that actually hurts. Everything else in this book is other people being horrible. This is her best friend.

And then she finds the book. An old one, all about hypnotism, and it works. Which would be brilliant, except somebody else wants it and he's already watching her.

A word about the setting. The orphanage is properly bleak, and the grown-ups in charge are cruel rather than comically strict. Molly is bullied, underfed, punished for almost nothing, and she thinks very badly of herself. Some children find that bit heavy going.

If your reader can sit with that, the pay-off is enormous. A girl this squashed suddenly getting the power to make adults do as they're told is about as satisfying as children's books get!

What to read next

If awful grown-ups getting their comeuppance is the appeal, The Orphans of St Halibut's is in the library as well. Those children have a matron who dangles them out of the window by their hair, and an inspection coming that they have to survive on their own.