Molly Moon 5 – Molly Moon and the Morphing Mystery

Georgia Byng's Molly Moon and the Morphing Mystery is the fifth book about Molly Moon, for 9 year olds who like their villains beautifully dressed.

What happens

Molly is about eleven. She is also a hypnotist, a time stopper and a time traveller, and her parents have taken her crystals off her and hired a tutor instead. Live like an ordinary girl, they said. Molly is bored out of her mind.

Then Miss Hunroe arrives.

She is not what Molly expected a teacher to be. Cream suit, red nails, rose perfume, and a gold coin she flips along her knuckles while overtaking on the motorway at well over a hundred miles an hour. She plays the piano beautifully. Forest, the ageing hippie who lives with them, is smitten. Even Molly starts to hope lessons might be bearable.

The first lesson is a trip to the natural history museum. Miss Hunroe parks in a diplomats-only space, walks Molly and her twin brother Micky past the stuffed apes and the painted deadly nightshade, and then presses a drawer in the archive so that a whole filing cabinet swings round like a door.

Behind it, at the top of one of the museum towers, four very peculiar women are waiting. Then Miss Hunroe locks the door and puts the key in her pocket.

Molly has a secret of her own, by the way. On her last trip she picked up mind reading and has told nobody. So when she takes a quiet look inside her new tutor's head, she sees something she was not meant to see.

Reading it is fast and daft and quite hard to put down. The twins spend the whole opening being rude to grown-ups who richly deserve it, which is very satisfying. And the title is not a tease. Turning herself into other creatures is where Molly is headed.

Running alongside all this is Malcolm Tixley, an alien hunter who is completely certain Molly Moon is not human. Her name gave it away, obviously.

Do know that Tixley's certainty gets physical straight away. In the first chapter he lies along a garden wall with a rifle, waits until Molly's neck is in his sights, and fires a tracking dart into it while she is playing by the pool. It is played for laughs and she thinks a stone hit her. It is still a man shooting at a child, on page one.

The bigger thing is that this is book five. The twin arrived from the future, an uncle got hypnotised into believing he is a lamb, and none of it is explained twice. Your reader will follow it. They will enjoy it far more having met her properly first.

What to read next

So start at the beginning. Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism has her in a freezing orphanage, holding the toothbrush she has just been told to clean the toilets with, and a library book that changes everything.