cbr11bingo – Birthday!
Earth is now on the brink of being inhabitable, and she’s got no bones to pick about telling us why. Luckily, as she reveals to us in her narration of AstroNuts, NNASA (Not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has been planning for just such an event, secretly creating four super-space soldier animal hybrids in their secret laboratory under Mount Rushmore. Blasting off in Thomas Jefferson’s Nose Rocket, AstroWolf, LaserShark, SmartHawk, and StinkBug launch their mission of finding an unoccupied Earth-like planet for us to relocate to. When they arrive on the Plant Planet, all appears to be quite conducive to future civilization. But the Plant Planet has some tricks of its own up its sleeve, and it is about to teach the AstroNuts some valuable lessons.
I was, like many of my generation, a huge Scieszka fan (The Stinky Cheese Man, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, etc), so I figured I’d be in for a weird and enjoyable ride. This one was a lot more weird than enjoyable – not his best. But it did have some fun aspects. My favorite thing about this was the Narrator, Planet Earth herself, and she is wildly passive-aggressive through the whole thing, commenting frequently on how humans are really destroying her. I can definitely get behind a planet on the offense. I also like that LaserShark was the most femme of the creatures, haha. She was delightful.
But isn’t it a little weird to craft a book about ecology and saving the planet where the main characters were basically animal experiments? I guess there’s something poetic to animals saving the day, but whenever I think of animals in space, I think of the actual animals we sent into space, and that just makes me sad.
And the format was just a little too bizarre, and the humor doesn’t totally land. It might land with Captain Underpants fans though.
But oh well, it filled my birthday bingo. LOL! Scieszka celebrated his birthday on September 8.