Margaret Mahy: The Greatest Show Off Earth (Hardback)
Author: Margaret Mahy
Illustrator: Wendy Smith
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 1994
Format: Hardback
Pages: 198
Suitable: Upper Primary / Secondary
This book finds Mahy in an antic mode. It's a space farce
featuring a couple of orphaned kids who escape a dour craft on which humor is
abhorred as fatally dangerous.
Eventually, they discover the power of laughter and their
missing relations in a cosmic circus that, Sleeping Beauty-like, has been
dozing until it can be awakened by some well-timed jokes.
Along the way, Mahy makes comic use of the children's
remarkable attributes (since Delphinium is a calculator and Jason a library,
each is a fund of information, by turns handy or amusingly incongruous); concocts
a gallery of extra-terrestrials that rivals the weirder inhabitants of Oz; and
sports with words with her usual wit and aplomb (the arch-villain, Delphinium's
former nanny Molly, is also known as La Mollerina, the Williwaw of the West).
Code: 9780241001752