Read Cows in Action 11 – First Cows on the Moon free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Steve Cole's First Cows on the Moon is a very silly science fiction adventure for 7 year olds in which three time-travelling cattle try to rescue the Apollo moon missions.
Professor Angus McMoo is the brainiest bull in the world. He has built a time machine inside a garden shed. Pat is his careful young sidekick. Bo is the one who does kung moo and has painted her udder with luminous paint.
They work for the C.I.A. That is Cows In Action, not the other one.
The book opens with two battered robot bulls dropping out of the night sky to destroy them, and two shiny versions of the same robot bulls raiding the shed at the same moment. Older and younger copies, arriving from different points in time.
Bo says her brain hurts just thinking about it. Your reader's probably will too, in the good way.
The chase lands them at the Kennedy Space Centre in 1969, two months before the first moon landing, dressed as high-ranking air force officers with a forged cover story and disguise rings through their noses.
Here is the thing that makes the series work. The jokes are relentless and mostly terrible, and the history underneath them is real. Saturn V rockets. The space race. Why the firefighters on the base were called hot papas. A child comes away knowing things, having thought they were only having a laugh.
The puns are the main event, so be warned. Moo-FO. Ter-moo-nator. Kung moo. Very nearly being flame-grilled. If that makes you groan, imagine it at bedtime, out loud, for four chapters.
On the noisy side, there is a lot of cartoon shooting. Laser guns blow up fences, walls and control panels, and Bo settles most arguments with a kick. Nobody is hurt in any way the book takes seriously, and the robots are clearly machines rather than animals.
The bit I would actually pause on is the pair of human villains. Bessie Barmer and her mother are written as loud, greedy and cruel, and a fair few of the jokes at their expense are about how large they are. It is very much of its moment and a parent may want to skip past a line or two.
Your reader will want to know how a garden shed became a time machine. That is the very first Ter-moo-nators book, also in the library, and the robot bulls turn up almost the moment it works.
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