The Mennyms
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Includes extra content detailing the story behind how the Mennyms came to be. Previously unpublished and exclusive to the ebook editions, the author hopes her readers, new and old, will enjoy discovering the back story to this mysterious family of life-sized rag dolls.
From the outside, 5 Brocklehurst Grove looks like an ordinary house - the windows are always clean, and the garden well tended. And from the inside, to hear the voices of the inhabitants, the Mennym family, you would think they were a perfectly ordinary family, too. But you'd be wrong, for the Mennyms are far from ordinary. The whole family shares an astonishing secret behind which it's hidden for forty years; a secret to which nobody has ever come close - until perhaps, now. When a letter arrives from Australia, the whole family is plunged into fear that now, for the first time, their secret is about to be exposed . . .
Sylvia Waugh's extraordinary debut novel about the Mennyms, a family of life-sized rag dolls, won the 1994 Guardian Children's Fiction Award.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Waugh's wonderfully eccentric debut bears comparison with Mary Norton's The Borrowers and Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. The creations of a gifted seamstress, the title characters are ``a whole, lovely family of life-size rag dolls'' who inhabit a large old house in an English town. Some time after their maker's death, the reader is told, the Mennyms came to life and gradually developed a number of ingenious strategies for making their way in the ordinary human world. Waugh develops this whimsical premise with rigorous logic: the dolls can't eat or drink (but, with the exception of the philosophical blue doll Soobie, they all relish pretend meals); they can't be killed (though a good soaking is nearly fatal to rebellious Appleby); and they never grow older (Appleby celebrates her 15th birthday every July 4th). After four decades, however, their peculiarly static immortality has grown stale--Appleby, for instance, has been a surly adolescent for longer than her mother cares to remember. A letter from the lonely-seeming heir of the Mennyms' absentee landlord is the first of a series of events that triggers difficult but ultimately welcome changes. This poignant novel is good, old-fashioned fantasy at its finest. Ages 10-up.
