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In an alternate reality a lot like our world, every person's physical size is directly proportional to their wealth. The poorest of the poor are the size of rats, and billionaires are the size of skyscrapers.
Warner and his sister Prayer are destitute - and tiny. Their size is not just demeaning, but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger richer people don't ever have to think about, from being mauled by cats to their house getting stepped on. There are no cars or phones built small enough for them, or schools or hospitals, for that matter - there's no point, when no one that little has any purchasing power, and when salaried doctors and teachers would never fit in buildings so small. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them?
A brilliant, warm, funny trip, unlike anything else out there, and a social novel for our time in the tradition of 1984 or Invisible Man. Inequality is made intensely visceral by an adventure and tragedy both hilarious and heartbreaking.
"Starred Review. In a brash and wildly inventive novel, [Andrews] effectively uses a gonzo alternate reality to frame urgent issues that include income inequality, rampant consumerism, and class disparity. Warner may be small, but his giant heart and brutally honest narration propel this intense, cuttingly funny novel. Grades 9 and up." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Warner's distinctive voice and language compel readers to pay attention to this detailed world ... Brilliant, savage, hilarious, a riveting journey through a harsh world that mirrors our own." - Kirkus
"It's not subtle in the way that Gulliver's Travels, M.T. Anderson's Feed, and Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" series aren't subtle; it's social commentary with a bite ... Endlessly discussable and a first purchase for public and high school libraries." - School Library Journal
"[A] unique, caustic, thought-provoking lampoon of America's obsession with wealth." - Booklist
"Munmun takes a swipe at today's economic and political climate. It parodies the outlandish lifestyles of the supersized superrich contrasted with that of the destitute, tiny ultrapoor." - VOYA Magazine
This information about Munmun was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jesse Andrews is the New York Times bestselling author of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and the screenwriter of that book's Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning movie adaptation. He's also the author of The Haters, which Booklist called "effortlessly readable, deeply enjoyable," in a starred review. He lives in Brooklyn.
If you liked Munmun, try these:
by Matthew Desmond
Published 2024
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
by Christopher Leonard
Published 2020
Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard's Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
by Aman Sethi
Published 2013
In a time of global economic strain, this is an unforgettable evocation of persistence in the face of poverty in one of the world’s largest cities.
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