I said in my review of the first book in British author Hilary McKay’s new series about a girl named Binny and her family that these books were for people who were not averse to quirky and and slightly dysfunctional families. Then, in this next book, Binny in Secret, while Binny and her little brother remain quite endearingly odd, Binny’s mother steps in and becomes involved and responsible. It’s a good thing she does, I suppose, for the fictional Binny’s sake, but it spoils my thesis about Hilary McKay and dysfunctional, uninvolved, or absent parents. Oh, well.

Binny in Secret takes Binny and her little family—Mother, sensible older sister Clem, Binny (age 12), and sweet baby James (age 6)—to the country to live while their house is being repaired. (The roof fell in during a storm.) Benny hates life in the country, hates her new school, and really hates the new neighbors who are also the landlords. Unfortunately, Binny expresses her feelings about all of the above quite freely and gets herself into trouble with not only the neighbors but also just about everyone else.

The book has an anti-gun vibe, which is interesting because I didn’t know guns were an issue “across the pond”, but it’s nothing too propagandistic. And there’s a tiny bit of magical realism or fantasy mixed in with the realistic story about a girl who learns to temper her judgments and accept differences while she saves a wild animal friend from being hunted and killed.

Then, there’s the timeslip or time connection between Binny’s life and the children who lived in the country house back in the early twentieth century. Benny doesn’t ever travel in time. Nor do the other children—Clarry, Peter, and Rupert–travel to the future. But there is a connection as Binny finds relics from the past in the attic of her new home, and she works both literally and imaginatively to put together a story that will reveal the lives of long-ago children and what happened to them as they grew up.

In short, if you like Hilary McKay’s Casson family, you will probably like Binny Cornwallis and her family, too. I can see the Cornwallises and the Cassons becoming friends, marrying each other eventually, and raising little free-spirited Cornwallis-Cassons. Or Casson-Cornwallises.

I’m thankful today for the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of all of our families, especially mine. Lord, help us to give grace, laugh a lot, and enjoy each other’s peculiar strengths, habits, and even weaknesses.

Fuzzy Mud is a well-written and engaging look at biochemistry, math, bullying, bravery, cowardice, and making moral choices. Those disparate subject areas and themes in the lives of fifth grader Tamaya Dhilwaddi and seventh graders Marshal Walsh and Chad Hillegas form the glue that holds this novel together and make for a satisfying near-apocalypse story for middle grade readers.

It’s the “fuzzy mud” that’s the problem. The self-replicating microorganisms that are supposed to be a new fuel that will revolutionize the energy and fuel businesses may be out of control. And Tamaya, Marshall, and Chad are about to step into —literally—a big mess that makes their small problems with bullying and being bullied look really small.

Louis Sachar, the talented author of the Newbery Award winning Holes, as well as many other favorite middle grade and young adult novels, has written a great book. And it’s short, only 180 pages, a plus for reluctant readers who want a book that doesn’t take them a year to finish reading. The only issue I had with the book was the population scare statistics that are used to show the importance of developing a new, inexpensive biofuel. I have a thing about population alarmists: I don’t believe them. When I was in high school, back in the dark ages of the nineteen seventies, I was told that we were running out fuel and food and every other resource and that if people didn’t quit having so many babies the world was going to DIE OF STARVATION!

I read Paul Erlich’s The Population Bomb. I believed that the world was in crisis, and that children were the enemy.

“Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over.’ He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair ‘England will not exist in the year 2000.’ Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.’ By ‘the end,’ he meant ‘an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.'” NY Times Special Report

Anyone who is reading this post knows that Ehrlich’s dire predictions didn’t come true. I learned more and read more and went on to have eight children. And I resent reading a new, updated version of the old scare stats in a children’s book. I really think the “overpopulation” propaganda could have been left out of the book.

Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, the book was enjoyable, and I would recommend that you read it for the story and just ignore the over-population junk science.