Customer Reviews

Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine, No. 1

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I wish Amazon would put all of the books of the same title together. This book has at least 3 reviews, but it's hard to tell the way they have it set up.

Now for this book. I second the review by John Taber. However the first part of the book is very good. There is a lot of suspense. "What is the Professor doing in that barn, what is the meaning of the small keys, & why are secret agents spying on him?" The suspense builds but then the story collapses into silliness. The professor knows that much of life, even small life, consists of meat eaters, & yet he says that he hopes nothing will hurt them (maybe it was the severe bump on the head). And the scene where they get the web for Danny to "parachute" up to Dr. Grimes. Did the author really expect anyone to believe that the spider would see a potential meal barking at it & just simply crawl away?!

I have loved the Danny Dunn stories for over 40 years. Because of the internet, I now have the whole set, but I do have to give this one & "Danny Dunn Time Traveller (see my review) low ratings. However to give credit where it's due, the first part of the book until the metal plate scene is 5 star material, and the ending with the 2 scientists arguing as usual is fair. I just wish the rest of the book had been up to par.

Instead of using sound science, explaining it, and sometimes extending it like in the other fourteen books, this one stoops to one of the oldest premises of B-movie sci-fi - and it isn't even scientifically sound.

Just because it's easy to shrink people on screen doesn't make it possible. Particularly the way it happens here - accidentally falling in the machine, getting dismantled, and waking up in a compressed duplicate (with the originals still in the machine) and then being able to reverse the process and coming out exactly the same size they were before! How did they even survive dismantling? Even if the process worked how were they able to walk?

The whole premise just shakes me up, even twenty years after first reading it. (Might be all those movies and Hanna-Barbera cartoons.) The only reason why I give this two stars is the familiar, endearing characters.