by Teena Kay

Created on: February 25, 2010   Last Updated: February 26, 2010

Are you stressed? Do you want to save time during the day so you have more to spend it later with your loved ones? Do you feel that although you are saving time, time just seems to vanish? Do you feel that you are being conned?

Maybe you are one of those who unwittingly signed up with the Time Saving Bank, run by a strange breed of grey men.

"'Momo",  or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people.

Momo, a young orphan girl of no determinate age (anything between 9 and 12 years old, possibly), lives in the ruins of an old amphitheatre on the outskirts of an unnamed Italian town. She does not have many possessions, what she has was given to her by the town’s people.

Although Momo does not have a lot of worldly goods, she has something many people would envy her for, she has friends and she also has the ability to listen to people and their problems and ideas. When Momo listens, people are happy and although she does not necessarily come up with a solution, Momo’s friends and visitors solve their problems all by themselves. Children who come to play in the old amphitheatre come up with the most amazing games when Momo is around.

However, sinister men in grey have their mind set on signing up the good townspeople to their plans of investing in a time saving bank. By working faster and smarter, people save a lot of time which will be paid into a time saving bank account and produce dividends later in life. Plenty of adults sign up to this scheme, while children, and in particular Momo, notice that there was something very wrong. Friends and family did not have time for each other anymore, everyone was rushing to get things done. And, in the meantime, the grey men became stronger and stronger.

Momo decides to fight the grey men. But can a little girl succeed and beat the grey men at their own game? And what is their secret of success? Momo, together with a turtle that can see into the future (by 30 minutes) take on the grey men at their own game.

''The odd thing was that, no matter how much time they saved, they never had any to spare; in some mysterious way, it simply vanished''.

Michael Ende, German author, known mainly for writing children’s stories, was born in 1929 in Bavaria and died in 1995 from stomach cancer. Best known for his 1979 book, ‘The Neverending Story’, which has been made into a number of movies, more or less successful. As the first movie barely covered the first

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