Cows in Action – The Moo-gic of Merlin

The Moo-gic of Merlin is the eighth Cows in Action adventure by Steve Cole, a daft time travel romp for 7 year olds in which three cows go to Camelot.

What happens

Professor Angus McMoo is a bull with a shed full of history books, a rebuilt time machine and an enormous thirst for tea. Pat is his sensible young friend. Pat's sister Little Bo dyes her udder a different colour every day and would mostly like to punch something.

They work for the C.I.A. The Cows In Action, that is, who stop the Fed-up Bull Institute meddling with the past.

This time the F.B.I. are up to something in the Dark Ages, and King Arthur and Merlin are at the middle of it. The professor is thrilled. He'd always assumed Camelot was a made-up story.

They land in a moonlit field with the castle glowing in the distance, and about four seconds later somebody puts a sack over Pat's head. It's a butcher. Specifically, it's a butcher who looks exactly like the farmer's wife back home, because the boys keep running into her ancestors wherever in history they go.

The jokes are relentless and mostly made of cow. Half-robot ter-moo-nators. A custard alert instead of a red alert (like a red alert, only yellow, with a banana if you're lucky). A P.O.O. scanner that stands for Past Object Observation. Your reader will either groan at these or shout them at you, and probably both.

What makes it work beyond the puns is the pace. Something happens on every page. The chapters are short, there's a lot of dialogue, and nobody stops to explain the plot at length, so a seven year old reading alone doesn't lose the thread.

There's a running joke about the cows being scared of ending up as burgers, and this one adds a butcher with a very big meat cleaver who waves it about. It's played entirely for laughs, but if yours has recently worked out where sausages come from, you'll want to know it's in there.

You can start here without any trouble, because the world gets explained as it goes.

What to read next

If your reader would rather begin where it all began, The Ter-moo-nators is the first one. Bessie Barmer is already the enemy, the professor is still rooting through a scientist's bins for parts, and nobody has any idea what he's building at the bottom of the field.