About Momo & Lucy
Momo & Lucy is a children’s book. The author, Michelle Strauß, tells a lovely story with a good spirit and good intentions. It is centred around siblings Momo & Lucy, who, in spite of their very different personalities, come together on their love of planet Earth. In effect, the story uses a number of sub-stories centred around the brother and sister to showcase different ways that Momo & Lucy exercise their love for the planet on which they live.
Momo & Lucy: The environmental theme
For many a reader, this book will read a little bit too “on the nose” with its environmental theme. Instead of letting us discover the issues via the characters’ interactions and story, the story feels like a judgmental lecture that may unfortunately alienate the reader . The siblings’ dialogue, while sometimes insightful, often comes across as a mouthpiece for the author’s message, a message almost parading as the truth out of the mouth of babes.
The plot suffers from a common contemporary problem: announcing the conclusion too early and telling us how people feel rather than showing us through telling the story and unravelling it with the read. This makes the characters’ eventual environmental realisation feel less like a genuine discovery and more like a preachy foregone conclusion.
As for the writing style, the inverted commas encasing the dialogue were a distraction. It was also awkward when the characters’ feelings were only revealed after they had spoken, making their words feel disconnected. It would have been more effective to know their emotions beforehand so as to better understand their motivations.
Momo & Lucy: The change of genre
The abrupt shift in genre from realistic fiction to sudden fantasy is unsettling. It’s difficult to go from the mundane – like cleaning up a forest and shopping for zero-waste products—to a magical boat with a captain whose crew is made of leaves. This sudden change disrupts the story’s tone and pulls the reader out of the narrative. While a touch of magical realism could work to blend these elements, the book’s stark transition feels less intentional and more jarring, making it hard to suspend disbelief and fully invest in the latter half of the story.
In both genres, aspects of the story are questionable if not concerning. The forest cleaning scene suggests a worrying lack of (close enough) supervision, in a space where a child could have easily encountered any amount of strange objects that might have kindled their curiosity but not necessarily been safe for them. As much as I believe in the environment, children’s safety should be equally paramount. I kept on worrying they might come across a discarded condom! In the fantasy scenario, the fact that the children are willingly going off at night with a stranger adds another layer of concern.
Momo & Lucy: The look and feel
The book’s overall design is pleasant, featuring some lovely, simple illustrations. However, the choice to centre-align the prose is an unusual and unnecessary design decision more akin to poetry, and a larger font would have improved readability.
The story also overlooks a few practical realities, which makes its message feel less relatable. While the mother’s initial response is a good starting point, the narrative fails to consider the challenges faced by many families, such as parents who must drive long distances or commute from their children’s schools to their own jobs. A more thoughtful approach could have included solutions like carpooling, which not only benefits the environment but also teaches children about empathy and cooperation. By focusing solely on environmentalism, the story misses an opportunity to connect with readers on a human level, as it seems to suggest that being kind to the planet can somehow justify being judgmental towards others.
Momo & Lucy: Lost in translation?
While the book’s spirit is commendable and it contains some genuinely relatable moments, its preachy tone ultimately detracts from the message. Although not as heavy-handed as some other didactic literature, it risks instilling a sense of judgment in young readers who may conclude that anyone not following the book’s specific advice is uncaring.
This critique is aimed solely at the English edition, as I am curious to know if the original German version is any better. The translation itself is a positive step toward reaching a wider audience, but it is clear it was not followed by a proper editing process. A translator is not a substitute for an editor, and a translated book requires just as much proofreading as a book written in its original language.
The text is riddled with technical errors that constantly break the suspension of disbelief. Awkward phrasing, unnecessarily long sentences, and odd paragraph breaks are frequent. The confusion of narrative voices—between the author, the narrator, and the characters—turns the story into a didactic lesson rather than a natural vehicle for its themes. Finally, simple proofreading would have caught the many punctuation errors, some of which appear even in the title.
I am curious to read the German version of Momo & Lucy.
Momo & Lucy: more awareness of its audience
Translation also goes further than changing words from a language to another. It is about targeting a different culture, a different setting and adapting the way a story is written to reflect a voice that the new culture will understand. Recycling is a real part of German culture but it is not as much the case outside of their culture. Preaching might work in countries like Germany, but in a country like the United Kingdom, it might come across more negatively. There is a responsibility for the author to ensure that the translation takes into account the culture of the targeted audience.
Because a book’s audience is inherently diverse, writing nuanced consideration. Authors bear a responsibility to look beyond their own echo chambers. A book should transcend individual conviction to achieve genuine, meaningful communication, a distinction that achieved through Research. This means interrogating why the authors and others hold different views, the barriers that separates these views, tracing our and their perspectives, understanding the journey towards that mindset and crafting experiential narratives through immersive storytelling over heavy-handed lecturing. Without this foundational work, the narrative quickly defaults to moralising. This is perhaps more visible in the environmental preaching but even more starkly evident in the brief, tokenistic reference to African people lacking water. This clumsy phrasing and its sweeping generalisation perpetuates a double stereotype, reducing a vast, diverse continent to a monolithic struggle and defining an entire continent’s population by its scarcity, binding its identity solely to deprivation. It is a harmful narrative choice or oversight that severely misinforms young readers of all backgrounds.
There is a greater debt we have to children. Because they are learning, it is important that we make our aguments logical too rather than only emotional (a balanced mix is ideal), our writing exemplary and communicative rather than just a reflection of our self-expression. We have a duty to teach and not to preach, to relate to real feelings and experience even when we put them in a fictional context even with supernatural elements. When we take our pen to their minds, our ink to their sights, we have a responsibility for their growth. As a result, far more than any other book, a children’s book must be researched, beta-read, edited, re-edited, proofread. The scores will always reflect the attention put in these.
Conclusion
This book has a wonderful premise, some truly charming moments, and shows enormous potential. However, the final execution is significantly hampered by a clear lack of professional editing and proofreading. The English edition suffers from a multitude of issues, from awkward phrasing, unnecessarily long sentences and paragraphs (especially for children’s literature), and incorrect punctuation to a confusing text alignment, awkward cultural transpositions, and a font that is nearly illegible for children.
Beyond these technical flaws, the narrative itself feels disjointed. It contains unmanaged risks, like the children going off with a stranger, and a jarring, unsettling change of tone between realism and fantasy. The story also leans too heavily on judgment rather than discovery, making the main characters less relatable to the average child. Puzzling paragraphs, like one referencing people in Africa needing water when the illustrations show animals, also read poorly and should have been caught.
As it stands, the book provides a poor example for young readers in both writing and behavior, and for that reason, we have to give it a 4/10. We believe that with a proper revision, it could easily be an 8/10. We sincerely hope a complete re-edit is considered. If a corrected version is made available to us, we would be delighted to rewrite our review and submit a new rating on Amazon and Goodreads.