Max and the Millions

Gr 4–6—When their boarding school's janitor disappears, Max and his friend must sneak around their nasty headmaster to save the colony of tiny people developing a sort of early European medieval society in the janitor's rooms. The book alternates between Max's story and that of the tiny people, whose world moves faster than Max's and features three warring groups, each with their own hair color, led by their own silly royalty and tepidly reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's Carpet People. Max is a hard-of-hearing White British boy with no family and low self-esteem who occasionally trades upon his deafness to his advantage. Chapters are well formed and the action forward-moving, but the simplistic characters don't develop any depth as the story progresses, the dialogue is flat, and some readers may have a hard time suspending disbelief with the half-baked faux-science surrounding the tiny people. The bit with the over-the-top villainous headmaster is likely to be funny to some readers. Then there's the tiny people's trite travails and some gender-stereotype humor surrounding a group of marauding "Sparkle Pony"—obsessed five-year-old girls.