What a wonderful, wonderful book – written ostensibly for children, but I suspect many an adult will fall in love with it too. The mother of Halley (11), Koby (9) and Mimi (6) has won an all-expenses paid trip to a spa in Lapland. To make it easy for her to get away, the prize organisers have supplied a nanny to look after the kids. Their father – perpetually away on business, and referred to as “The Invisible Voice” – is expected home at any time. The only problem with this, is that the nanny is a very dusty monster – oh, and every mother in the street has won a similar prize (and monster!), fathers are few and far between. So, most of the children in the neighbourhood are to be left (human) adultless for two weeks in the charge of never-seen-before, big, hairy monsters, who come with an introductory piece of paper stating that they are harmless, trained for childcare and domestic duties, don’t speak, like TV and will sleep in a closet.
In these days of safe-guarding children, alarm bells would start ringing – don’t the parents ever talk to each other? Where have the monsters come from, and who decided they were harmless and well trained? To say they are part of an “experiment” does not really cut the mustard. However, that would be unnecessary nit-picking, and spoil an excellent story. All the mothers go off to Lapland, the monsters move in, and the “Invisible Voice” gets caught in a blizzard.
Thankfully, the children come from a long line of imminently capable fictional kids – think Famous Five, Pippi Long Stocking etc. – who don’t really need adults around. They realise that they need to find out more about monsters. Koby is a reader (as all great kids are), so he sends Halley to the library (no googling on a computer, a Library!), and miraculously she happens on the one and only book written about monsters such as their nanny, Grah. Armed with Runar’s treatise on monsters, and the advice of Mimi’s talking bathrobe, the children organise the neighbourhood, take good care of the monsters, trap the blood-sucking fairy-frog, and learn about the evils of indentured servitude and freedom.
The children are beautifully captured by the author: the sibling interactions, the relationships with their parents, their resilience and the ready acceptance of the unknown and unusual.
It is the youngest, Mimi, and her talking bathrobe (only she can hear it) who make the most headway with understanding the monsters: “Mimi: Do they want to go back to . . . er. Wherever they came from? Bathrobe: Naturally. Everybody wants to go back home. They don’t really fit in here … And people usually start to tease and bully anybody who is different … A monster is a monster, not a nanny. Understand?”. Soon, Mimi has everyone working to help the monsters. However, “Can the bathrobe be trusted? Does a sensible human being rely on the advice of a bathrobe? If the bathrobe said that the solution was to be found in the book, could one be sure? And what if it wasn’t?” The book supports the bathrobe: “The monster would not choose to be slave labor for humans. Regular human work would be alien to its free, wild nature”.
When the Invisible Voice unexpectedly makes an appearance, neither he, nor the children quite know what to make of each other: “It was already clear that visible Dad was unpredictable. He might speak at any time and interrupt whenever he wanted. Who knew, he might even start giving the children good advice or tell them off”. Thankfully, he is happy to go along with what the children already have in hand: ““So, what we actually have here is a monsters’ liberation camp”, Dad said. Halley and Koby nodded. “Exactly””.
So, an amazingly inventive and original story, with a solid moral underpinning. What more could you want in a children’s book?
I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review