Cows in Action – The Victorian Moo-ders

There is a working time machine in the cow shed in Steve Cole's Cows in Action - The Victorian Moo-ders, a very silly caper for 7 year olds.

What happens

The set-up takes about a page. Professor Angus McMoo is a bull who wears glasses, invents things and knows an alarming amount of history. Pat is his thoughtful young neighbour. Little Bo is Pat's big sister, who chews bubble gum, paints her udder purple and would much rather biff someone than think about it.

All three are agents of the C.I.A., which here stands for Cows In Action.

The call comes in from the future as an evaporated-milk alert, which the professor explains is like a red alert but with added vitamins and sixty per cent of the water taken out. The year they need is 1851. Somebody is picking off the members of a gentlemen's botany club in London, and Queen Victoria may somehow be mixed up in it.

So they put on ringblenders, which are nose rings that make a cow look human, squeeze into Victorian outfits and head for Pall Mall.

The jokes come at you about four to the page and most of them are cow puns. Moo-vellous. Udder-standable. Ter-moo-nators. Your reader will either find this the funniest thing ever written or will roll their eyes, and honestly there is not much middle ground.

Underneath the daftness there is a surprising amount of real Victorian London. Soot and smoke. Horse-drawn buses on filthy cobbles. Women selling hot potatoes from barrows. A boy in rags sweeping a clean path across the road so that ladies can cross without ruining their shoes. Cole slips the history in while you are laughing at a cow in a bonnet.

The one to check is the tone of the threat. People are vanishing, a ghostly cow is doing the vanishing, and the running joke is the word moo-ders. It is played entirely for laughs and nothing upsetting is shown, but the villains are genuinely trying to change history so that cruel cows rule the planet, and there is a lot of shouting in capital letters. For most children that is the fun of it.

What to read next

There is a whole run of these and they do not need reading in order. If this one goes down well, The Roman Moo-stery has the same three cows up against gladiators and a chariot race.