Warner is a littlepoor, smallest of the small in Yewess society. His struggles to survive and gain munmun in order to grow his wealth and body see him used, abused and jailed. Prayer, his sister and Usher, his friend, deal with the littlepoor challenges differently and try to help Warner make honest ethical decisions.

The only place where littlepoors have equality with the middles and bigs is Dreamworld, where Warner creates and infiltrates others' dreams with his intricate imagination.

A quirky read, I relished the part made-up language - often needing to be read aloud to pick up the humorous nods to the real world. A clever concept, this is an exploration of society, wealth and the consuming grip of power. Very much recommended - just be open to how quirky it is.

The basic premise of Mun Mun is stellar in its originality and simplicity: everyone is a different size based on their wealth. So the poor are tiny, and the rich are giants. It’s obviously an allegory, and I was interested to see the mechanics of the world. That’s one thing that’s done very well. Andrews has a vivid, if stark, way of describing things in few words, which allows a lot of world-building to pack into a short amount of time. The different sizes of buildings, the way that the roads work (cars that fit over other cars!) and the basic way of life for the ‘littlepoors’ is very interesting.

There is a heavy use of slang and unusual language in this book, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The overall style of the language is very stripped back, which makes sense for a character who struggles with reading and writing, and a lot of words are squished together (it’s never clear if this is Warner’s doing or a generally accepted orthography). The density of this unusual language reminded me of A Clockwork Orange, except not taken to such an extreme. After a few pages, it’s easy to read (though I did find the Kindle version almost unreadable as it made every portmanteau look like a formatting error; it was much better when I switched to PDF).

However, the slang also complicates things, and shows up some holes in the world-building. The book is set in the Yewess (which took me around 200 pages to work out was the US), but there is no indication of whether this is the future, or a parallel world, or what. Slang like ‘lol’, ‘bradpitt’ and ‘ryangosling’ is used, which I found jarring as the references seem to belong to the last couple of decades, but otherwise the world is unrecognisable. In the same vein, I found the political satire (of world leaders literally talking about each other’s penises) to be a bit heavy-handed. There’s also an extremely pointless and boring rant about MLM/pyramid schemes that takes around 3 pages. So boring.

I did not like the main character at all. He makes stupid, selfish decisions, but ultimately always bounces back. Several of his friends end up dead or addicted or otherwise mangled to give him motivation. Very importantly, this book ought to have a trigger warning, because around 90 pages in, there is a horrible scene of gang rape. I understand that this is a book about the desperation of poverty, but it was unnecessary, and served only to further the journey of the main character Warner – his sister Prayer, the victim, is barely sketched out as her own character. It became all about his man-pain, as she barely features in the whole next section of the book – in fact, throughout the book, Prayer only shows up when she is useful to Warner. There are barely any other female characters, and they all are attracted to Warner, but dumped when they are no longer of interest to him.

From about 200 pages in, I was bored. I didn’t like Warner’s plots, and I thought that the narrative was ill-served by becoming a revenge-against-the-rich story. I lost all sympathy for Warner. Far more interesting was the plot of him getting to middle-size, and learning to fit in with that world – I would have liked it if the story kept some gravity rather than just going off in the bonkers way it did. The entire dream-world thing, which was very cool, was distinctly underused and disappeared from the page for the middle 250 pages or so.

Ultimately, this book is far too long for what was an engaging idea. I would have thoroughly enjoyed the allegory and satire if this were a short story, or even a novel of 250 pages or so. But 400+ pages is too much for a main character that’s hard to care about, on a mission that doesn’t make sense.

I’m really struggling for a rating because I think there’s a lot to love in this book, but for me, only the first half worked, and I thought that the author’s attitude to women sucked. I think it will have to be just 2 stars for me. A better concept than execution.

Munmun is set in a world where if you're rich you're huge and if your poor you're tiny - literally. The richest are giants while the smallest are so small they are prey for cats and rats. Siblings Warren and Prayer seriously poor. Their family is so poor their father was stepped on by a teenager and killed. and their mom badly injured when hunted by a cat. They know their only hope is to 'scale up' i.e. get bigger and richer but in this world it's hard to find a next meal let alone a way to beat the money/class system.

It's really hard to know where to begin reviewing this. At first I was confused, then a wee bit bored.....then as I adapted to the speech patterns I began to enjoy the story. And I would have been giving this 4 stars but the ending is pretty weak. I'd have to say this is a great idea that has been....well not poorly executed but maybe over complicated.

Sorry, I could not finish this one - I struggled with the writing style and got a bit lost in where we were going.

This is a difficult book to rate. It's a brilliant idea, cleverly done, but I didn't like the main character much and I found the dialect hard to follow. That's largely me, though, I've never been good at dialect.

The book was compared to Douglas Adams so I was expecting humour, but there isn't any, really. There's no real explanation of the dreaming stuff, either.

An interesting concept, but not for me, sadly.


Receiving an ARC did not affect my review in any way.