Georgia Byng’s Molly Moon, Micky Minus and the Mind Machine is the fourth Molly Moon adventure, a hypnotism caper for 9 year olds built around a twin brother she has never met.<\/p>\n
It opens in a hospital nursery with the world on fast forward. Nurses flicker in and out, cots whizz past, and then a doctor with a stiff gelled quiff walks in, checks the wristbands on two babies, picks up the boy and vanishes into thin air.<\/p>\n
Molly is watching all this from behind a cabinet, because the baby he has just taken is her brother.<\/p>\n
Then the scene changes completely. A walled garden on a mountaintop, blazing sun, a boy of about eleven hiding under a green umbrella and a six-year-old girl in a silver dress and gold bangles. Two grown men in pom-pom circus outfits sit at a table with boxes of live orange centipedes in front of them. When one of them gets a quiz question wrong, the little girl makes him eat one.<\/p>\n
It’s horrible. It’s also exactly the sort of thing Byng does brilliantly, because she plays it perfectly straight and lets you work out how frightening a small child with total control over adults actually is.<\/p>\n
Back home in England, Molly and Rocky are eating a takeaway in front of the telly with the storm rattling the windows and Petula the pug hiding under Molly’s legs. Some of the best pages are Petula’s, because Byng hands the dog whole stretches of the story and she has firm opinions about everything, including Molly’s nose.<\/p>\n
Then a nappy advert comes on with a commando baby crawling through a jungle, and Molly can’t watch it.<\/p>\n
She only found out two weeks ago that she had a twin. She promised her parents she would go back in time and find him. And she has spent a fortnight riding horses and watching films and eating ketchup sandwiches instead, because time travel is genuinely frightening and she keeps dreaming about being stranded in the wrong century.<\/p>\n
There is a catch. This is the fourth book and it hands you a great deal at once. Molly can already hypnotise, stop time and travel through it, and the parents she has only just got back were hypnotised for eleven years by her own uncle. A reader starting here will be catching up for a while.<\/p>\n
The place to start is Molly Moon’s Incredible Book of Hypnotism, where she’s a scruffy, unhappy orphan in a horrible children’s home, and a book in the library changes what she thinks she’s worth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Georgia Byng’s Molly Moon, Micky Minus and the Mind Machine is the fourth Molly Moon adventure, a hypnotism caper for 9 year olds built around a twin brother she has never met. It opens in a hospital nursery with the world on fast forward. Nurses flicker in and out, cots whizz past, and then a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10693,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8098,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism","lr_seo_hook":"A hypnotist with a twin brother she has never met, hidden in the past."},"book_tag":[1045],"age_group":[24],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[347],"class_list":["post-8100","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-adventure-books","age_group-books-for-9-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-georgia-byng"],"yoast_title":"Molly Moon 4 – Molly Moon, Micky Minus and the Mind Machine by Georgia Byng | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A hypnotist with a twin brother she has never met, hidden in the past. For ages 9+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n