The Mummy

Mummy By Caroline B. Cooney         Have you ever met some one who was near perfect? Well that is what the main character is like in the third outside reading book I read. The title of my third outside reading novel was the Mummy. Mummy was written by author Caroline Cooney. The novel Mummy was set in Present day America. The protagonist of the novel is named Emlyn. Emlyn is a senior is high school, whom every one thinks is perfect or the ideal teenager. Donovan is one of Emlyn’s friends who came up with the prank. In this novel, Emlyn and her friends have a plan for the ultimate senior prank. The group will perform the prank on Mischief night. If she pulls of the prank, she will go down in school history as the best prankster ever.

        Everyone in Emlyn’s town thought that she was the perfect student, the perfect athlete because she excelled in many sports, or just the all around perfect teenage girl.

One day when Emlyn and her friends were in school; they came up with a very good prank that they would do on Mischief night. Mischief night was the night before Halloween where kids did many mischievous pranks. The prank was that they would go to a local museum and sneak in to the Egyptian hall of the museum and pick up the mummy and leave museum to hang it in the bell tower at the school. When Emlyn said, “‘ It’s an interesting idea.’”(Page 5) She said in such a sarcastic way that it made her friends think it was a stupid idea. Also, this meant that she wanted them to back out so she could do it all alone. This showed that she was not perfect because she wanted to do the prank.

        When Emlyn went into the museum she to observe the complete movements of the guards, she came up with the idea of dressing up like a high school newspaper reporter even though she was not one. Her high school didn’t even have a Newspaper. After she sneaked into the Officials Only room, she met Dr. Brisbane’s secretary. She led her into the Trustees room where she waited for Dr.Brisbane to get off the phone. When she was talking to the Secretary, she said many lies. When the narrator said, ”Emlyn chatted about western High even though she went to Eastern”(Page 29) This should that Emlyn was not the perfect image that every one sought her to be. In fact, she was no where near perfect.

        When it came to mischief night and Emlyn successfully retrieved the Mummy from the museum. She had the mummy in her hands and suddenly realized how alive the mummy felt. So when she was with a block of the school she turned around and went back to the museum and put it back. When she turned around, she called the Egyptian Embassy to apologize. When she said “ was it wrong to call the Egyptian Embassy?”(Page 210) we once again find out that she is not perfect.                         This novel was very different then any thing I have read this year because the narrator in this novel is third person Omniscient which is when the story is told by a god like character who knows all. All the other books were told in first person. In this novel we learned the Emlyn was not perfect. The moral of this novel was that nobody is perfect.