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Terror on Planet Earth!
I’ll have to admit that I had secret hopes for this kids’ book set up there on the surface of the moon. Through all of my reading over the years, I’ve been disproportionately more impressed with books written in the 1960s than with any other decade. It might be odd to say, but the ’60s were like a mini-golden-age of writing.
Before finding this book at a thrift store, I’d never heard of this moon-character Matthew Looney or the author, Jerome Beatty, Jr., but the book cover and blurbs drew me in. The New York Times apparently wrote: “Matthew Looney combines the ingenuity of Buck Rogers with the charm of Charlie Brown,” and who doesn’t love ol’ Chuck? Plus, I just couldn’t resist trying out a fun-loving space novel for kids set within a moon colony published the very year we first landed on the moon! This had all the makings for a great read.
Sad to say, it simply wasn’t a great read. We made it through five chapters together, me reading the book aloud to my kids (ages 11 and 12), but it was just too weird to follow. Perhaps if we had read some other Matthew Looney books before this one (this being the third book of several), we’d be more familiar with his character—not to mention his weird and unexplained moon species. We then could have better tracked what-on-the-moon was going on. But jumping into the Looney universe cold turkey like this just didn’t help us buy into it. The puns and jokes were cringy, the plot was uninteresting, and the characters and inventions that populate this moon colony were too hard to track.
Granted, had we been kids growing up in the space-age 1960s, these book might have struck a chord with us. Beyond sentimentality purposes, though, I don’t think these books have aged well, and I highly doubt they’re considered classics of American literature!
We took a gamble on this one and lost, but thanks to Tony Reinke’s “100 pages minus your age” rule, we don’t mind giving up in favor of something better. Rasmus and the Vagabond (1957) by Astrid Lindgren it is!
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