Millions paired boys finding two duffle bags full of money with questions about God and Jesus. And his shtick, as I see it, is to write books that star boys, have high-concept ideas, are laugh-on-the-subway-and-get-strange-looks funny, and then also make you think about life, death, the universe, and everything in it. Here we have a man who has written books like Millions and Framed. Big kid.Ĭonsider one mister Frank Cottrell Boyce. Instead, it’s up to him to get them safely home. Only now something has gone wrong and Liam’s finding that being the “sensible adult” is a lot harder when you want to scream and yell and run around like all the other kids freaking out around you. And then he kind of sort of won a competition to be the legal guardian that went along with the kids. And then they sort of got flown to China where she was going to be one of the first kids to go to outer space. He sort of won a contest for the world’s greatest dads and conned his classmate Florida into pretending to be his daughter. That sort of brings us up to speed because when the novel opens, that’s where Liam still is. And then there was the time he found himself on a rocket hurtling through space without knowing how to get it back. The time he almost got away with driving a car out of a dealership. There was the time he was the only kid tall enough to ride the roller coaster, which in turn led to him getting free rides (and freaking out his dad). Liam’s a pretty good kid, but looking like a grown-up has gotten him into sticky situations. What happens when a twelve-year-old boy goes through such a growth spurt that he looks like he’s thirty? Well, in the case of Liam, inadvertent space travel. And if it has, we’re one step closer to having a space-based chapter book that everyone can enjoy. Because by then Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce should hopefully have found its readership. But let me call you back in fifteen years and maybe your answer will be different.

But how many of them are classics? How many of them are memorable? How many could you tell to the person on the street and get a spark of recognition in return? For now, none. Oh, there are tons of books where kids go to space, sure.

Where are the books about kids in space that have remained within the public consciousness? Fact of the matter is, there aren’t any. The kind we blasted into in the 1960s and then never returned to. What’s that? You can’t think of any significant children’s books that took place in space? Would The Little Prince count? I guess so, but that’s not really the kind of space I mean. Now just pluck out for me the ones that took place in outer space. The ones that encouraged you to consider the world around you. The ones you still think about sometimes. Think about the books you read when you were a child.

Cosmic frank cottrell