Cows in Action – The Ter-moo-nators

Steve Cole's Cows in Action - The Ter-moo-nators is a daft, fast time-travel comedy for 7 year olds starring a bull with a PhD and a shed that goes anywhere in history.

What happens

Professor Angus McMoo has his head stuck in a dustbin. Again. He is fishing out the bits of computer junk the scientist next door throws away, and he will not say why.

Pat is a young bullock who thinks the professor is awesome. His sister Little Bo is a cow with attitude who chews bubble gum instead of cud, dyes her udder bright green and runs self-defence classes for the other farm animals. The classes are not going brilliantly. The ducks have ducked out of Tae Kwon Do and the sheep are too busy eating to learn judo.

Then McMoo yanks a lever, the walls of his shed spin round, a bank of controls rises out of the hay and the whole place turns into a time machine.

Before they can even test it, a cloud of black smoke appears and a robot bull with green eyes, steel horns and a spike for a tail steps out of it, pointing a ray gun. It has come from the future to change the past, and it is called a ter-moo-nator.

The whole book runs on puns like that. Your reader will either groan or love it, and mostly they will love it because there is a new one every page.

This is where the series starts, so the time machine gets built here and the jokes get explained here. A good place to begin.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Bessie Barmer is the villain and the book is extremely rude about her body. She is "as fat as a hay bale", with "a face like a sweaty boar sucking a dirty lemon" and fists the size of piglets. It is meant as pantomime, and the cows give as good as they get, but if that kind of joke is not welcome in your house this one makes a meal of it.

There is also a running gag that Bessie would happily turn everyone into burgers and sausages. It is played for laughs and no animal comes to harm on the page, but a child who has just worked out where meat comes from may take it more seriously than intended.

What to read next

For more of the same daftness, The Moo-my's Curse sends the same three agents to ancient Egypt, where something large and bandaged has taken the pharaoh's throne.