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.

If I was less pleased with
Scales of Justice
on second reading, I was more pleased with Death of a Fool.
On first reading I found it dreadfully strange and confusing, mostly
because it involves the weird and wonderful world of Morris dancing. I
know very little about Morris dancing even now, but I knew nothing of it
then, and wondered what kind of rabbit hole I’d tumbled into.

Here’s the little I’ve gathered; but don’t quote me. At certain times of
the year in English country villages, a group of men would put on
costumes adorned with ribbons and bells and dance an odd sort of group
dance. Sometimes there would be a sequence of dances and something like
a play, with ritual actions and words. The usual explanation is that
the dance, the play, and especially the words were a hold-over from
pre-Christian fertility rites.

Death of a Fool was first published in 1956; at that time, I
gather, what you might call authentic traditional morris dancing was
greatly in decline. The book takes place in a small village, where the
the “Mardian Morris”, or “Dance of the Five Sons”, is still performed
every winter on “Sword Wednesday”, just as it had been for centuries.
But Mardian is described as perhaps the last village where the authentic
thing still persists as an authentic tradition, performed by the villagers
solely for the villagers, and as yet unnoticed by outsiders.

If you want to know more about morris dancing, just do a Google search; I
found buckets of websites all about various morris dancing associations,
and I confess I did not particularly scrutinize any of them.

The tale itself is an interesting variant on the locked room mystery.
The play calls for one of the dancers to hide in a hollow behind a low
stone for a time, and then eventually rise up; and when the time comes
for the dancer to rise up it’s discovered that he’s been beheaded. And
yet the stone was in plain sight throughout, and no one was seen to go
near it. So how was the deed done?

Inspector Alleyn is in his usual good form, and there are a number of
memorable characters among the villagers; it made for a nice, comfortable
read.