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. Publisher: Greenwillow Booksweiterlesenschließen Produktdetails