Blog Tour: The Shrinking of Grin by J. Edwin Skinner

The Shrinking of Grin by J. Edwin Skinner 
Publisher: CAAB Publishing Ltd
Publication Date:  February 23, 2025

 

About the Book:

While Grin’s scientist father is disturbed by the unexplained disappearance of his research institute’s director, Magnus G. Musselman, Grin is more interested in emulating his father and sets his mind to conducting a series of crazy experiments: on flies. 

He cannot imagine the trouble this will land him in. 

Literally cut down to size when he is faced down by a big fat bluebottle, he finds himself prey to a gigantic wasp and is only saved at the last minute by a huge frog that takes pity on him when he lands on a lily pad in the garden pond. 

Guiding Grin down through the depths of this pond, the frog takes him to a fabulously weird world called Quilibria with the promise of a quick fix for his situation. Yet the fix is not as quick as he would hope in this strange new dimension, where nothing is quite what it seems.

But it is the only place where Grin can hope to find the solution to his sadly shrunken state and get back to his normal size. 

As he travels through Quilibria in search of the solution, he is met with one obstacle after another thrown in his way by a succession of weird creatures.

Will he find what he’s looking for? 

If he does, will he be able to take it with him or will he stay this size forever? 

And what does Magnus G. Musselman’s disappearance have to do with any of this?

Rating: 

Review: 

This was such a strange but interesting read. Grin (short for Peregrine) is a young boy who is constantly trying to please his father, a scientist obsessed with precision and perfection. Grin plays piano to make his father happy, and in his own time, collects flies to study, seemingly mirroring his father's research on insects and rodents. But when Grin suddenly finds himself shrunken down to bug size, he’s forced to embark on a bizarre and dangerous adventure to return to normal.

The story felt like a mix of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Alice in Wonderland, with a little bit of science, but mostly whimsical and odd. While the pacing was solid and the adventure kept moving, I often found myself confused by the world-building and the characters/bugs that help and hinder his journey. The strange dimension of Quilibria had some creative moments, but I felt it could have benefited from more explanation and development to fully immerse the reader. There were times when I felt like we were time-warping through zones. The ending also felt quite abrupt.

Overall, this was a quick, adventurous read with plenty of whimsy that I think younger middle grade readers will likely enjoy more than I did. It’s imaginative and fast-paced, even if at times it left me scratching my head.

About the Author:

A native of Exeter, J. Edwin Skinner studied at Newcastle, London and Bristol. He worked briefly as a teacher of English in Germany and a translator in the UK, before moving with his young family to work for a multinational company in Switzerland, where he eventually set up his own translation business. Under the pen name A.B. Decker, he has also published Flowers from the Black Sea (2024), The Dark Frontier (2021) and is working on another book set mostly in Austria around the time of World War 2.

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