Cows in Action – World War Moo

World War Moo is a Cows in Action book by Steve Cole, and it sends 7 year olds to the London Blitz with three time travelling cattle.

What happens

Professor McMoo is a large red bull and the cleverest creature on Farmer Barmer's farm. He loves history, inventing gadgets and tea, sometimes all three at once, which gets messy. Pat is a young bullock. Bo is his older sister, a milk cow who chews gum, picks fights and paints her udder (today, a Union Jack).

They work for the C.I.A. Cows in Action. The hay barn is secretly a Time Shed, complete with a wardrobe of cow sized costumes for every period in history.

Their director, a bull called Yak, calls a blue cheese alert. That is one step worse than a red alert and a good deal smellier. The enemy have been stealing enormous quantities of butter, and three ter-moo-nators, who are half bull and half robot, have already been sent back to 1940.

Which is how the three of them end up in London on the evening of the thirteenth of September 1940.

The jokes come at roughly three a page and most of them are cow puns. Your reader will either find this the funniest thing ever written or wonder why everyone is mooing. There is no middle ground with this series.

The surprise is how much real history sits underneath the silliness. McMoo asks the shed computer for the facts and gets them straight. Seventy three nights of bombing in a row. Over a million houses blown up. Buckingham Palace hit.

And the Blitz is not just scenery here. They land in a yard behind a row of houses, walk round the corner and find rubble where the houses used to be. An air raid siren goes off. Bombs start falling. McMoo shouts run for your lives and he means it.

So it is a very silly book with a real war inside it. For a child doing the Second World War at school, that mix can work brilliantly. For a younger or more anxious reader, the bombing is genuinely tense before the next gag turns up.

The type is large, the chapters are short, and sound effects arrive in capitals.

Bessie Barmer, the farmer's wife, is worth a mention too. She hates every animal on the farm and says so at volume, which is played for laughs but is not exactly gentle.

What to read next

If this lands well, the first Cows in Action book explains where the Time Shed came from, and sends the three of them from a cow paradise in the future to the dungeons of Henry the Eighth.