Munmun Hardcover – April 3, 2018

I saw Borges once. I must have been a teenager then and he was lecturing on the Metaphor. I wish I could recall his erudite and creative arguments, but all I remember is my surprise at discovering that this man of outsized vision and prodigious invention was actually blind. And his height: he was sitting on an altar and we listened looking up at him, like the giant that he was. Half a century later, Jesse Andrews has created the Mother Of All Metaphors. One that gives tangibility and immediacy to the crushing weight of the most consequential and dramatic feature of human social existence: wealth inequality.By equating wealth with body size, Andrews masterfully recreates the wrenching gut feeling of being subject to the cruelty of poverty by imagining a world, dialect and all, where the experience of poverty acquires the full dimension of tangible reality. He places dispossessed Werner its narrator, right next (or under) wealth, creating an image of what otherwise is unimaginable…or too disturbing to accept. Jesse doesn’t approach the topic with the romantic piety of Dickens or the slapstick humor of Charles Chaplin. Nor does he conveniently relegate people with extreme body sizes to isolated and remote Gulliver islands like Swift. Squirrel-sized Warner describes his life in the fantastically uneven city of Lossy Indica through the daily tribulations that we recognize so well, except for the scale, refusing to resign to the unfairness his terrible condition. Not unlike Greg, when facing death in Andrew’s “Me, Earl and the Dying Girl”. Warner description of his life in the fantastically uneven city of Lossy Indica conveys the utter nonsense of our economic reality better than a million treatises.MunMun’s scale is actually geometrically incorrect. If body size were actually proportional to wealth, the rich would be astronomically large and the have-nots about the size of viruses. But Jesse’s license is understandable: he needed to bring inequality to size so that his characters could fit the intricate world of irony, pain and humor that is so enjoyable in this amazingly imaginative metaphorical masterpiece.

I had trouble finding this book in stores & on second hand book websites. I prefer to acquire books second hand for many reasons. I am glad I finally found a copy & was lucky to snag a hardback version! The Hardback has a lustrous foil image that really puts the theme of the book promptly on display. Well done to whomever thought that up! A definite win & deal. Very happy customer!Item came on time & was well packaged. Will be returning for any other book needs or finds.

There are authors that make you laugh internally. A quick nod at a witty line. Between this book and Me, Earl and The Dying Girl, I’ve never laughed more when reading a book.The prose is tricky at first, but if you allow yourself to get into it, will take over and put you in the shoes of the main character in a very unique way.

I loved it. I got the audio too and it's fantastic. It's almost one of those books that is meant for audio and Andrew Eiden did a fantastic job narrating. The story is cool, thought-provoking, and Warner, the MC, is awesome. Kind, but tough. Motivated, but realistic and honest with himself. He's a good kid who was dealt a crappy hand in life but made the most of it anyway. Fantastic world-building. Top. Notch. Characters. The voice is vivid and upbeat even though Warner really has to get through some very tough times. I thought the ending was a little open for my tastes but it didn't detract from the story. It was just that good. I don't really want to leave this world and I'm hoping for a book two. :)

I wish I could craft a review eloquent enough to compel everyone to buy this book. It is thrilling, thought provoking, emotional and heart felt.

Teenage granddaughters liked it

This book was so interesting and unique. Unfortunately, the ending reduced this book from a 4.5/5 star book to a 3/5.

This is a strange, disturbing, hilarious, and ultimately thought-provoking book that teens and adults should read.

Scathingly satirical take on society, and the importance of money.Fantastic book.

This is a peculiar tale, the blurb describes it as warm and funny but that isn't what I took from it. Don't get me wrong I did enjoy it but for me it was rather dystopian and downright chilling in places - maybe I was overthinking things and putting a far more literary bent on it than was intended by the author. For me this was more than just the face-of-it tale but it was about the barely hidden parallels to modern society and constantly whilst reading those would jump out at me so I was unable to seperate them from the tale.Munmun takes place in a world similar to ours but with some striking differences. On the whole your size denotes your net worth, your wealth and the whole process of how that is figured out is quite daunting and it is explained to us in a manageable way. Our main protagonist is Warner, littlepoor, rat sized Warner with a dead father and a crippled mother and an annoying sister, Prayer. The tale centres around their adventures as Prayer moves to Sand Dreamough (accompanied by Warner and his best friend stuttering, limping Usher) to besiege the Middlerich bastion of learning and snare a husband that can scale her up. Not the best plan but it is all they have.What follows is a treatise on how life seems to be, how your place in the world determines the treatment you receive from others and how "bettering yourself" is not as easy as those who already have much, much more than you would have you believe. The story takes place between the rather depressing Lifeanddeathworld and the psychedelic Dreamworld - on the whole, I think I would take Dreamworld if I was Warner.It is definitely an unsettling read and one that I feel sure will creep on to school syllabuses as there is a lot to discuss here and lots of symbolism. Heck, you can even argue about the place names and who the Bigrich are supposed to represent - although that will depend on the times the book is read in and who people perceive to be the uber-wealthy. Normally this is the sort of book that I struggle to complete, finding that all the things I perceive behind the words on the page cause the story to be lost. Somehow this didn't happen here and I found that I was existing in my own parallels of Lifeanddeathworld and Dreamworld where part of me was enjoying Warner's life story and another part was analysing for all it was worth.On the whole an enjoyable story that does make you think - even when you don't want to!

Unusual mainly because of the language which worked well to keep the whole thing moving fast (though munmun itself as a word makes me feel faintly queasy). Obvious parallels to Gulliver's Travels and a similarly satirical look at modern society. Rather more savage than Swift, I think, though it's a long time since I read Gulliver.I didn't really find it funny in spite of many clever references. More, spine chilling. In a way, the whole story is laid out in the first full paragraph in which Warner, the hero tells us of his tragic beginnings and asks "did you blurt a little giggly laugh? No you didn't, Okay good, ofcourse thanks for not laughing, sorry for being the Laugh Police".Oh well, yes - it is funny. In a way.There were a lot of editorial spacing errors which were a real problem given that the language was weirdly spaced already. Many times I had to stop to work out which bits belonged in one sentence and which were random spacing errors. Particularly where one character's stammer was being spaced out as well. A shame in a book where the language use was so important.

I bought this after watching Me and Earl and the Dying Girl which I loved (except for the crass comment on the film he sends to college, which I'm hoping was the film maker, not the writer).Anyway, lots of things I loved in both: the clearly graphic imagination that makes you wonder why he chose words instead (or is he, Kitty-like, unable to create the things he sees, lacking the empowering skills?) Then there's the loving temperament, the desire to help and heal, the not-just-desire but absolute need for greater equality. All great, all admirable. What I'm Hmming about, though, is structure and technique. The narrative is too convoluted, too repetitive, too detailed in places and vague in others. This is, I fear, a short story that got too big for its boots. Clever metaphor, clunky realisation.

I was definately drawn in by the book. The new grammar was super cool. It was weird to read the new word constellations but that's what kept the book interesting and it suited the story and the main character Warner. The development of the story was interesting. It was a constant up and down. Once the readers were settled in to the situation, three sentences shook up the whole story, a lot of stuff happened and all of a sudden everything was different. Great and totally different way of telling a story, it drove me crazy but kept me excited to keep on reading. I didn't like the ending though, it was really unsatisfying for all the stuff Warner had to suffer through.