Molly and the Mutants lays glorious 80’s waste to the sophomore curse

Molly and the Mutants, it sounds like a bubblegum band from the 60’s, doesn’t it? Assuming that you’re reading for non-classroom purposes, reading should be fun. It’s an experience that can transport you to a different world, relax your brain, make you think, and perhaps even make you cry, but it should be fun. And wow, did Moll and the Mutants ever get the fun memo and is running with it down the halls of upper elementary school and mglit fiefdoms across the land.

This is the second entry in the Far Flung Falls book series and doesn’t miss a beat in getting rid of the sophomore curse boogeyman. We were big fans of Molly and the Machine, a book that sounds they should be a pop group from Scandinavia, and called it an effortless read for ages 8 and up. If that’s an accurate way to describe the first book then Molly and the Mutants laces the tracks with bacon, doughnuts, and cat videos, just in case the first book wasn’t appealing enough.

But wait, in the spirit of legendary spokesman Billy Mays, there’s more. You upper elementary, middle school and high school students say that you don’t like reading, that you haven’t got the time to read when there’s a new TikTok trend that you’ll be hours behind on. There’s a new dance that will prove your lemming’s worth to millions of people who don’t know that you exist yet. Hear me as I say this, Molly and the Mutants is set in the time of Stranger Things.

It’s that golden era of pop culture perfection, the 80’s, with shopping malls, Waldenbooks, banana bicycle seats, no cell phones and teenage awkwardness aplenty without the ability to record it. This book also has monsters, lots of monsters and a Goonies-type group of kids who are running from them and trying to figure out what’s going on. All of this is set in the history of Molly’s recent giant robot slaying escapades where she defeated the metal behemoth and left parts of its hulking metal façade in her backyard.

Everyone in Far Flung Falls knows that Molly is clever and smart, so that when mysterious things start happening they look to her for some assistance. Her best friends Margo is also looking for her assistance for activities that are more social. She’s got a crush on a boy, who happens to be best friends with a boy who has impeccable hair that Molly kind of fancies. A note with certain boxes is passed around, some things get checked and the four meet at the local creek, where the monsters start to make their presence known.

As a child of the 80’s, everything about Molly and the Mutants resonated with me. The social pressures, the music that they listened to, the unknown cool factor of the bus driver and the odd coincidences that made life pop so much are all here in the book. However, most of the folks who read Molly and the Mutants aren’t children of the ’80s, but they’ll still love the book. It moves with such a quick pace that you’ll find yourself not being able to read as much as you want to each night. You will wonder what happens next, be tempted to look ahead, but pinch your right hand so that you dig into each atmospheric detail about Molly and her friends.

When the book hits its final third act, it is full-on running with entertaining twists and turns. Each chapter adds another perspective or more details about the monsters, Molly and her friends, or some other seemingly impossible coincidence. The monsters get impossibly large and the danger never gets watered down or to too off-the-charts unbelievable……provided that you’ve accepted that this is 80’s-based mglit with giant frogs the size of a building roaming around town. Yeah, the impossibility of that scenario is high and very silly, but it’s very fun to read about and is just the sort of blend of comedy, science-fiction and friendship that ages eight and up will enjoy.

Molly and the Mutants has the same breathless, fun-to-read sensation that City Spies and the Spy School book series provides. It’s an entirely different setting of course, which invites an audience that might not like espionage into the living room of leisure reading for fun, which is a great place to be.  Those series, as well as, Far Flung Falls are equally as entertaining to boys or girls in grades four and up. Even you surly middle school readers, who are much too cool to read a book, will find yourself effortlessly lost in the action, budding romance and science-fiction chaos of Mutants. You can even make a TikTok video about how cool the book is that could be seen by tens of your fans who haven’t seen online content since the last time they logged on.

Molly and the Mutants is book #2 in the Far Flung Falls book series and is written by Erik Jon Slangerup and is available on Aladdin, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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