A review by cosbrarian
Astronuts Mission One: The Plant Planet, by Jon Scieszka

3.0

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.