Cosmic / Frank Cottrell Boyce

Cosmic is 13 year old Liam’s favourite saying. Liam is also very tall, he has more facial hair than a 13 year old should have and he is in the Gifted and Talented class at school. Liam is, therefore, regularly mistaken for an adult and is constantly being told that he should “know better” when he acts like a 13 year old! Frank Cottrell Boyce has weaved an entertaining story out what happens when Liam decides to start acting like a grown-up to get some of the things he wants like entrance to a contest that could win him a free trip to a new theme park with rides that are “out of this world.”

Cosmic puts Liam in a situation that every teenager wants yet despises at the same time. To be treated like a grown up seems to some teens to be the answer to all of there annoying problems. As Liam finds out there is a lot to learn about being an adult, and one of those things is how to deal with teenagers. I like this book, because of the mixture of humour, drama and life lessons it presents to young adults and yet

Boyce, Frank Cottrell (2008). Cosmic. London: MacMillan Children’s Books.

Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic / Terry Jones

Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic is a science fiction / comedy novel written by Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame). Jones flawlessly imitates Adams’s style by weaving a silly, unpredictable and exciting story of three earthlings that accidently get stranded on a gigantic alien starship with few other passengers and malfunctioning robots aplenty. The Starship Titanic almost broke the economy of the planet that built it and would be blown up if certain crooked officials have there way…and if the bomb ever gets to finish its countdown.

Jones has created a story faithfully in Adams’s style and if readers enjoyed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy or any of the Monty Python works, should take a fancy to Starship Titanic. The earthling characters adapt to their respective roles with confusion and competence while the aliens are predictably unpredictable. Who would have thought that Yassaccan guards always shot over the heads of there combatants in a gunfight? The content of this book is a little bit violent, a little bit sexy, a little bit suspenseful and a lot of fun. It certainly a book that teens who enjoy science fiction would get a laugh from.

Jones, Terry (1997) Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic, New York: Ballantine Books.