Molly Moon 3 – Molly Moon’s Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure

Molly Moon's Hypnotic Time Travel Adventure by Georgia Byng is a hypnotism story for 9 year olds, the third about Molly, and this time it adds India and the small matter of travelling through time.

What happens

It opens somewhere completely unexpected. An old temple priest is filling flat metal dishes with milk for the sacred rats, who come scurrying out of the shadows to drink. Outside in the sunny street there are pony dealers arguing, piglets in the gutter, women drawing water, a camel being loaded and a beggar playing a flute through his nose.

A man with a big moustache and a purple turban buys himself a paan, climbs back onto his horse, and vanishes. Horse and all. With a BOOM.

Then we are in Briersville, in the fog, with Molly.

She is eleven and she is a master hypnotist. Until a month ago she thought she was an orphan. Now she has her mother back, and her mother spends her days wandering among the topiary animals in a dressing gown, so sad about the eleven years she lost that she cannot enjoy getting them back.

Molly cannot understand it. She is rather annoyed about it, actually. She has plans. She wants to turn part of the house into a hypnotic hospital where people can be cured of things.

What makes these books such good company is Petula, Molly's black pug, who gets her own chapters and her own opinions. Petula does not trust the new gardener in the yellow overall. She can smell nerves on him under the pepper and the spices. She has tried to tell Molly and Molly heard "make breakfast". So Petula settles into her basket with her special stone and decides that if nobody else is going to protect Molly, she will teach herself to stop time.

Your reader will be several pages ahead of Molly for most of the opening, which is a very satisfying place to be.

There is real sadness underneath the silliness. Molly was stolen as a baby and put in a horrible orphanage by her own uncle, and this book starts with her discovering that getting your mother back does not automatically make anybody happy. It is handled lightly, but it is there.

What to read next

If your child likes the idea of doing something extraordinary while the adults around them fall apart, start where Molly does. Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism has her in a freezing bath at Hardwick House Orphanage, being measured with a tape measure for using too much water, weeks before she finds the book that changes everything.