This is a book I got at a book fair at my kids’ elementary school a year
or two ago, with the expectation that maybe I’d read it to them as a
bedtime story. It looked somewhat interesting, and the first few pages
were not bad, and David that it looked really good. It’s been sitting on
the shelf ever since, and I decided I’d read it through myself first,
rather than starting on it with the kids and getting myself in another
Lemony Snicket situation.

Molly Moon is your basic
unattractive-and-poorly-behaved-in-spite-of-her-best-intentions young
ragamuffin girl; she lives at your basic
orphanage-run-by-sadists-who-don’t-like-little-kids. Most of the other
kids call her names and are mean to her, and the woman who runs the
school makes her clean out the toilet with her toothbrush for misbehaving,
and her only friend is adopted to a family in New York.
Molly finds a book on hypnotism, learns how to hypnotize pretty much
anybody, and proceeds to start making a few changes around the orphanage
and in her life in general. Along the way she travels to New York and
has to outwit the evil Professor Nock, who wants her hypnotism book for
his own nefarious purposes.

I found the book less annoying than Snicket’s
The Bad Beginning–not a difficult trick–but although it
had some good bits it was a bit tedious, with a fair amount
of heavy-handed moralizing and some thoroughly unbelievable changes
of heart toward the end. The dust jacket describes the author as
“Another challenger for the crowns of J.K. Rowling and
Philip Pullman,”
which is laughable. On the one hand she’s not nearly as skilled as
either, and on the other nobody does heavy-handed moralizing with such
self-defeating panache as Philip Pullman.

If things run according to form, I’ll probably get two or three comments
from kids who think Molly Moon is simply the best. And that’s fine; my
point is simply that unlike Rowling’s books, or
C.S. Lewis’s, or Lloyd Alexander’s, you’re not
going to see many adults reading about young Molly for their own pleasure.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to save the book for a few years, and
let the kids read it to themselves if they like. I’ve been through it
once, and I feel no need to read it again.