Excerpt from Molly Moon Stops The World by Georgia Byng, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Dear Davina,

Sorry about this, but you know too much.

Suddenly a heavy hand grabbed Davina's arm. She looked up to see a familiar face smiling down at her. Davina felt petrified with fear. Her body went winter cold. Her ears suddenly seemed to stop working. She could no longer hear the sounds of New York. It was as if the cabs and traffic, sirens and horns no longer existed. All Davina could hear was her own voice—her screams as she found herself being dragged toward a parked car. She looked beseechingly up at the uniformed doorman in the distance.

"Help! Help me!"

But the doorman did nothing. He stood motionless, looking the other way. And desperately kicking and struggling, Davina found herself being pushed into a Rolls-Royce as unceremoniously as a stray dog might be forced into a pound van. She was driven away into the night.

CHAPTER TWO

Molly Moon threw a bumper-size packet of Honey Wheat Pufftas up the supermarket aisle. The box flipped through the air, and the fat cartoon bee on it flew, for the first and last real flight of its life, before it landed with a crunch in the shopping cart.

"Bull's-eye! Twenty points to me," Molly said with satisfaction. A shower of Jawdrop bubble gums came raining down into the cart from over the shelves of cereals.

"How can Ruby eat so much gum?" a boy's voice asked from the other shopping aisle. "She's only five."

"She sticks her pictures up with it," said Molly, pushing the metal cart to the canned-fish corner.

"How can Roger eat so many sardines? That's what I want to know. Cold, too, straight from the can. Disgusting. You can't stick pictures up with sardines."

"Ten points for those gums and double it, Green Eyes, because I got them in from over the other side." The husky-voiced boy emerged from behind a giant stack of baked beans. His dark-brown face was framed by a white hat with earflaps. He put a large bottle of orange squash concentrate in the cart.

"Thanks, Rocky," Molly said. Orange squash concentrate was Molly Moon's favorite drink. She liked to drink it neat.

She disentangled a pen from behind her ear and messy hair and wrote down their chucking scores in a small worn notebook.

Molly 45 100 140 175 210

Rocky 40 90 133 183 228

"Okay, wise guy. You win this week. But I'll be the champ before Easter."

Then Molly consulted their list. It said:



Happiness House Shopping . . .

Boring Stuff

potatoes
parsnips
coffee
tea bags
white flour
celery
chicken
cashews
chops
sausages
onions
lettuce
milk
sugar
Honey Wheat Pufftas
oats
frozen peas
butter
tomatoes
eggplants
cream
10 tins sardines
eggs
parakeet food
dog food
mouse food
baguettes


Exciting Stuff

Qube
fizzy drinks
biscuits
ketchup
sweets
potato chips
Moon's Marshmallows
Heaven Bars
sherbert
cheesy biscuits
orange squash concentrate
magazines


Presents

Jawdrop gums
popcorn
chocolates
lip gloss
teeth whitener
shaving foam and razors


Happiness House was the orphanage where Molly and Rocky lived. When Molly Moon was a baby, she'd been left on its doorstep in a Moon's Marshmallows box, which is how she'd got her name. Until recently the children's home had been called Hardwick House, and as that name might suggest, it had been an extremely difficult place to live in. But just before Christmas, Molly had been dealt a spectacular, life-changing card. In the library in the nearby town of Briersville, she'd found a faded old leather-bound book, The Book of Hypnotism, by Dr. Logan. It had changed Molly's life. After learning the book's secrets and discovering that she possessed incredibly powerful hypnotic skills, Molly had left the orphanage and gone to New York, accompanied by the orphanage pug, Petula. There she'd used hypnotism to get the starring role in a Broadway musical called Stars on Mars. Molly had fooled and controlled hundreds of people, and she'd made lots of money. But a crook called Professor Nockman had discovered her secret. He had kidnaped Petula and blackmailed Molly into robbing a bank for him.

From Molly Moon Stops The World by Georgia Byng. Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.