The emergency that opens The Roman Moo-stery is that Professor Angus McMoo has run out of tea bags.<\/p>\n
He is a bull. He wears glasses. He has turned his cow shed into a time machine, mostly out of bits pulled from the neighbour’s bins, and he has just used it to nip forward to the twenty-sixth century for a brew. This is roughly the level of silliness Steve Cole is working at, and he keeps it up for the whole book.<\/p>\n
McMoo has two sidekicks. Pat is thoughtful and likes puzzling things out. Little Bo dyes her udder a different colour every day, chews bubble gum instead of cud, and runs self-defence classes for the other farm animals whether they want them or not. When there’s a problem, Pat wants to think and Bo wants to whack it.<\/p>\n
All three are Cows in Action agents, which shortens to C.I.A. and has nothing to do with the other one. The job is keeping history straight when bad-tempered bulls from up ahead come back to bend it. Today’s bother is a half-robot bull with green eyes and a ray gun, who has been robbing electronics shops and carrying the loot back through time. Nobody knows where to. So they follow him, at two hundred years a second, and land in Rome in the year 64.<\/p>\n
What’s unexpected is how much real Rome is in it. The Circus Maximus. Chariot races. The Forum Boarium, a genuine cattle market, boarded up. An emperor promising the people bigger and badder races than anyone has seen. McMoo gets so excited about the history that he keeps forgetting the mission, which Pat has to manage around, and which is a joke on the professor rather than on the reader.<\/p>\n
The puns are relentless. Moo-stery. Ter-moo-nator. Geronimooooo. Some children think this is the funniest thing ever written and some roll their eyes, and you probably already know which one you’ve got.<\/p>\n
Nothing here is truly frightening, though there is a lot of cartoon fighting. Bo takes on three armed gladiator bulls and wins with karate, a milk squirt in the eyes and a punch on the nose. A street splits open and belches fire. A ray gun vaporises a slab of marble that was very nearly somebody’s head. It’s all played at the speed of a chase, with capital letters and exclamation marks, and nobody gets properly hurt.<\/p>\n
The darker Roman facts get a light touch. One character cheerfully wishes she’d been alive to watch cattle fight in the arena. It’s a sentence, not a scene.<\/p>\n
Should this land well, the first Cows in Action book is in the library. That’s where the cow shed becomes a time machine, the future cows show up on the farm, and none of the three of them have the first idea what they’re agreeing to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The emergency that opens The Roman Moo-stery is that Professor Angus McMoo has run out of tea bags. He is a bull. He wears glasses. He has turned his cow shed into a time machine, mostly out of bits pulled from the neighbour’s bins, and he has just used it to nip forward to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11228,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7126,"lr_next_read_anchor":"the first Cows in Action book","lr_seo_hook":"Time-travelling cows against robot bulls in the Rome of Nero."},"book_tag":[23],"age_group":[19],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[942],"class_list":["post-7125","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-funny-books","age_group-books-for-7-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-steve-cole"],"yoast_title":"Cows in Action – The Roman Moo-stery by Steve Cole | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Time-travelling cows against robot bulls in the Rome of Nero. For ages 7+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n