Molly Moon 2 – Molly Moon Stops the World

Molly Moon Stops the World opens with a famous child actress walking home alone in New York and finding an envelope with her name on it under a streetlamp.

The note says sorry about this, but you know too much. Then a hand takes her arm and she is dragged, screaming for help, into a car. The doorman of her own building watches it happen and does nothing at all.

That is chapter one, and it is genuinely nasty. It is also over quickly, and the story moves straight to a supermarket in England, where Molly and her friend Rocky are seeing who can throw a box of cereal furthest into the trolley.

Molly is an orphan who found a book about hypnotism in a library and turned out to be frighteningly good at it. She has promised Rocky she will not do it any more. She is finding that very hard.

You can see why. Georgia Byng writes the hypnotism as a physical thing, a warm fusion feeling that runs through her like a tropical sun, and giving it up is described as being told never to walk on your hands again once you have worked out how.

So she finds a loophole. She only promised not to hypnotise people. Nobody said anything about a hedge clipped into the shape of a dog.

And what comes back is not the warm feeling at all. It is an icy prickling, and something in Molly has changed.

This is not the first Molly Moon and it does tell you what happened in the first one, in a tidy paragraph near the start, so read them in order if your reader minds that sort of thing.

A word about the tone. A child is snatched off the street in chapter one, the orphanage Molly grew up in was a genuinely miserable place, and the book is quite happy to be creepy. It is also very funny about ketchup sandwiches, a pug and a supermarket trolley. If your reader enjoyed being a bit scared and then laughing about it, that mix is the whole appeal.

Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism is the place to start, with Molly in a cold bath in a crumbling orphanage having no idea what is about to happen to her.