Read Cows in Action – The Battle for Christmoos free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Cows in Action - The Battle for Christmoos is Steve Cole at his daftest, a time-travel story for 7 year olds that lands three cows in 1066 two days before Christmas.
You need to know a few things and the book explains all of them in the first chapter, so nobody is lost.
Professor Angus McMoo is a genius bull who built a time machine out of an old cattle shed. Pat Vine is quiet and does things properly. His big sister Little Bo Vine chews bubble gum, paints her udder (berry red today) and prefers carols with a killer bass line. All three are agents of the C.I.A., which here stands for Cows in Action, a squad of time police from the twenty-sixth century.
Their job is stopping anybody who tries to change the past. Mostly that means the F.B.I., a gang of fed-up bulls.
It opens the day before Christmas Eve with the cows in Santa hats, hanging paper chains in the Time Shed. Then a parcel arrives. Bo rips it open before the professor can stop her, and a sprig of holly shoots out like a bat and slices straight through the main power cable.
The shed takes off with nobody steering.
They come down in a field of very startled Anglo-Saxons, hovering ten metres up, and the men run off shouting about Norman witchcraft. It is 23 December 1066. William of Normandy is being crowned in two days. Somebody wants that to go differently.
The jokes are almost entirely puns and your reader will either groan or love it, probably both. Merry Christmoos. Farmer Christmoos, who flies over on a barn pulled by turkeys. Lord Angus of Burger. The professor stops mid-crisis to ask for a cup of tea, which happens a lot.
Underneath the silliness the history is doing its job. Normans, Saxons, the invasion, the coronation, a bit of Anglo-Saxon translated badly. A child will come out knowing what 1066 was.
One small thing. Bessie Barmer, the farmer's wife, hates all the animals and would happily turn them into pasties and pies, and the book is rude about her looks in a way that has aged a bit. It is broad cartoon nastiness rather than anything frightening.
If your reader is at the stage of wanting big noisy set pieces and a joke in every other line, this suits them down to the ground.
If the three cows are the draw, The Ter-moo-nators is here as well. It opens with Bo running a self-defence class for the other farm animals, which goes about as well as the boxing pig deserves.
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