Johnny and the Bomb: The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy, Book 3
Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that one of the main characters is a marginal delinquent, and this is played for laughs. Also, the central event is a neighborhood bombing during World War II.
Families who read this book could discuss the paradoxes of time travel raised by the author. What are these "trousers of time" that they keep talking about? How can two different versions of the same event exist simultaneously? How can someone continue to exist after they've prevented their own birth?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Matt Berman
If you like your science fiction to make at least a pretense of scientific sense, Terry Pratchett is not your guy. Even though he references Stephen Hawking and his ideas, the time travel here is more akin to magic, except that even magic follows some rules. There is no attempt at explaining why or how it works, or even having it work in a consistent way -- Pratchett is more interested in using it to propel his riffs on whatever amuses him.
The first half of the book can get a bit tedious, as Johnny and his friends mope and bicker, and Johnny sometimes seems like a candidate for Prozac. Once they have a clear goal, though, the story picks up considerably, and becomes exciting and suspenseful. But Pratchett's fans, while they want a good story, mainly come for his clever British humor, and there's plenty of it here, though some seems a bit more strained than usual. In the Pratchett canon, the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy is easier to read and deliberately provides more to talk about than his other books and series. So, while it's generally weaker storytelling than, say, his Bromeliad or the Tifanny Aching Adventures, it's a good choice for discussion groups.
From The Book
"Anyway," said Yo-less, "if you changed things, maybe you'd end up not going back in time, and there you would be, back in time, I mean, except you never went in the first place, so you wouldn't be able to come back on account of not having gone. Or, even if you could get back, you'd get back to another time, like a sort of parallel dimension, because if the thing you changed hadn't happened, then you wouldn't've gone, so you could only come back to somewhere you never went. And there you'd be -- stuck."
They tried to work this out.
"Huh, you'd have to be mad even to understand time travel," said Wobbler eventually.
"Job opportunity for you there, Johnny," said Bigmac.
Plot Summary:
In this conclusion to the trilogy, Johnny Maxwell and his friends -- Yo-less, the sophisticate; Bigmac, the delinquent; Wobbler, the hefty nerd; and Kirsty, the snippy genius -- find an elderly bag-lady sprawled in an alley. After getting her an ambulance, they take home her shopping cart full of stuff, only to discover that it's a time machine. Sent back to 1941 they have to decide if, and how, they should prevent a German bombing that killed all the people on Paradise Street. But even small changes in the past have big consequences in the present, and each decision splits off a new, parallel reality.
Related Books:
Other Books by Terry Pratchett:
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Diggers
Truckers
Wings
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Wintersmith
Humorous Science Fiction:
The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp by Richard Peck
Lost in Cyberspace by Richard Peck
The 13th Floor: A Ghost Story by Sid Fleischman
Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer
The Supernaturalist by Eoin Colfer
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Hitchhiker's Guide series, Book 1 by Douglas Adams
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
Simon Bloom, the Gravity Keeper by Michael Reisman
Related Web sites:
Official Site
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ViolenceA bomb is dropped on a residential neighborhood and people are killed, a gun is fired at a child, a cat claws people, a girl uses judo on an adult and knocks him down. |
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Social BehaviorOne of the main characters steals cars and other items. In the past, minor characters exhibit racism and sexism. |
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CommercialismDoc Martens and Tesco (a British market) |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoAdults smoke cigarettes and pipes. |
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