Cows in Action – The Viking Emoo-gency

Steve Cole's Cows in Action - The Viking Emoo-gency is a daft time-travel adventure for 7 year olds starring three cattle with a time machine disguised as a cowshed.

What happens

Professor Angus McMoo is the brainy one. Pat Vine is his young sidekick. Little Bo Vine chews bubble gum instead of cud, dyes her udder green and will fight anything.

They are agents of the C.I.A. Not that one. Cows In Action.

Their enemy is the F.B.I., which is the Fed-up Bull Institute, a pack of evil bulls from the far future who would very much like cattle to rule the world.

Yes. It's that sort of book.

This one opens at dawn with Bo strapped into a pair of mechanical wings powered by her own heartbeat. She flies beautifully for about forty seconds, then belts the farmhouse wall with her udder and wakes Bessie Barmer, who is the farmer's wife and the scariest thing on the farm.

Then somebody lassos Bo out of the sky. It turns out to be one of their own bosses from the twenty-sixth century, who thought she was an enemy agent on a stolen bird.

He's brought a job. The F.B.I. has been breaking into zoos and taking the animals into the past. An octopus. A pair of lions. Nobody knows why, but it's called Operation Viking, and something is dragging Danish raiders off their ships in the year 878.

Now, the puns. There's one in nearly every line. Moo-vellous. Emoo-gency. Prime Moo-ver.

Did you smile at those, or wince? Because it never lets up, not for a single page, and your reader will be either delighted or exhausted by the end of chapter one.

The chapters are short, the noise is constant and it's written to be gulped rather than savoured. That's no bad thing for a reader who's just getting going alone and wants the satisfaction of finishing something.

This isn't the first one, and the text says so. The bosses remind McMoo of the day they took him into the future and recruited him, which has clearly already happened. You can still start here without being lost.

What to read next

If they want the beginning properly, The Ter-moo-nators has McMoo actually building the time machine, and a robot cow turning up to wreck history before he's finished testing it.