Johnny and the Bomb

Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy is a fun and light-weight series of books. Okay, some of the slang and references the kids use can be a bit cringe-worthy, having been written by someone who has left childhood behind a long time before, but there's an undeniable charm that keeps you going despite the occasional groan. The series reaches it high point here with Johnny and his friends journeying back to WWII, trying to put right on their second trip what they accidentally put wrong on their first. Pratchett avoids a lot of the pitfalls of the time-travel genre with his "pants trousers of time" theory, which allows them a great deal of freedom in their journey (since every outcome leads to possible futures, none of which are essentially bad), but brings a level of suspense to the proceedings that was absent in the early efforts. Their mission isn't to keep the Germans from winning the war or anything so melodramatic, but to reunite all the friends in the present. While failure will mean... free burgers for life. A fitting and enjoyable conclusion to a enjoyable trilogy of books.

Johnny and the Bomb (The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy) is a great book for kids as well as adult fans of Terry Pratchett.

Johnny Maxwell worries about many things, such as money, AIDS and his father (who has left the family), but that doesn't explain the dreams he has --- day and night --- of war planes and bombs. Fortunately, he can vent all he wants to his four buddies: Yo-less, Bigmac, Wobbler and Kirsty. If only he had a time machine like the one they just saw at the movie theater, then all of his problems would be solved. He could set his life up to be perfect. On the way home from the time-travel film, they find a shopping cart belonging to homeless, crazy Mrs. Tachyon, who is passed out beside it. After the ambulance hauls the woman off, he puts her cart in his grandfather's garage for safekeeping. Johnny doesn't look through the cart, though he can't help but notice some weird things in it, like fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, which no one does anymore. Even stranger, the paper looks new but is dated from World War II. Kirsty believes that the cart is a time machine. Johnny disagrees --- until he is hurtled back in time for a few moments. Back in the present, an ominous black car chases Johnny and his friends. They time-travel, landing in their very own British hometown, on May 21, 1941. Johnny knows that the town was bombed on that day, killing many innocent people. Can Johnny and the gang do anything to change that fact without destroying the future? In the meantime, his pals are accused of being war spies --- and one is in danger of actually being erased by their trip into the past. JOHNNY AND THE BOMB touches on heavy topics, including war, the nature of time, history (Can it be changed? And can change be a good thing?), gender and racial prejudice, and more --- in a frequently side-splitting and thrilling yet deeply thought-provoking manner. It also continues the Johnny Maxwell tradition of portraying distant "others" (such as people from the depths of history books) as alive and real. In short, this book is amazing. And highly recommended. (By the way, if you haven't read the first two books in this trilogy, ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND and JOHNNY AND THE DEAD, you're missing out on some fantastic reading.) --- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon

For the Terry Pratchett fans out there, nothing more need be said. It's Pratchett, you want to read it, the only reason you've been hesitating is because it's marked as a kids book (juvenile, young adult...) But this one isn't just for kids. As with any Pratchett book, there are layers and layers, and some of them wouldn't be obvious to kids at all. For example, kids who have only seen the Batman movies, and not the original TV show, will miss it entirely when Mrs. Tachyon is saying "dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner..." and continues a few more times between interruptions, finally ending with "dinner, dinner, Batman!" which is where adults (at least my generation) will realize she's not saying dinner, she's humming the theme song. Also, kids the age of our protagonists, 13 or so, may not recognize the "red shift" when they get to it; that's usually covered a bit later in the science curriculum, such as college physics. The protagonists are Johnny, and his friends Wobbler (who wobbles), Bigmac (who is large), and Yo-less, who is apparently the only black in Blackbury who doesn't say yo. They are joined in this book by Kirsty/Kasandra (she changes her name each week), who is hyper-intelligent and socially even more inept than the others. Each of this team has his own strange store of skills or knowledge. These talents turn out to have entirely different implications when travelling in time than they do in their own time. Bigmac's car-stealing abilities (which some parents may object to in a kids' book) turn out to be impaired when trying to steal a car that doesn't have power steering and power brakes. On the other hand, Yo-less's lack of cool is suddenly changed when he puts on period clothing and suddenly looks, as Johnny says, as though he plays the saxophone in a band. Yo-less does, though get exposed to the more primitive social prejudices of 1941, as does Kasandra. And Bigmac finds out that the skinhead symbols and attitudes that he wears only as a social item suddenly have real meaning, and it's not pleasant. OK, there's a bit of a moral or two snuck in here, about thinking about what things mean. There is also at least one moral that readers one and all will ignore, just as the characters do, about following advice (and about giving it). Johnny has been working on his World War II project for school since the previous book, "Johnny and the Dead." One of the funny bits in the book is how, whenever a kid claims he's doing "a project," he winds up with all sorts of information that is unsuitable for kids, and/or hitherto classified or secret; the remembered horror of school projects makes all the adults give in so that they don't have to think about it any more! Other reviewers have described much of the plot, so I won't repeat it here. One thing that some readers may wish to note about this plot is that it isn't just time travel, it's alternate history as well, and for kids this may serve as an introduction to the whole sub-genre of altern

In my opinion, Johnny and the Bomb is the best book in Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy. While classified as juvenile fiction, this book bears the strongest resemblance of the three to Pratchett's Discworld ideas and characterizations, containing much more social commentary, satire, and sidesplitting comedy than Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead. For such a normal twelve-year-old kid, Johnny Maxwell has some amazing adventures. This time around, he becomes a time traveler. Old Mrs. Tachyon, whom we have met briefly earlier in the series, is now revealed to be something more than a crazy bag lady; she is a time-traveling crazy bag lady. When she turns up injured, Johnny and his friends summon an ambulance for her and take her trolley cart (complete with her ornery cat Guilty) to Johnny's garage for safe keeping. Johnny notices that some of her bags seem to move of their own accord at times, and this discovery quickly leads to an episode of quite unexpected time travel. Eventually, the gang (Johnny, Wobbler, Bigmac, Yo-less, and Kirsty) go back in time to 1941, the very day preceding an unexpected and accidental bombing of one section of town by German bombers. They try to be careful not to mess the future up, but Bigmac finds himself in trouble with the police, Wobbler is assailed by a brat who keeps calling him a spy, and somehow the future gets mucked up a little bit in the process. Finding their way back home to the future is a difficult task; arriving back home without Wobbler and having to figure out a way to go back and retrieve him is even harder, especially since it involves convincing the 1941 authorities that the town is going to be bombed at a specific time.The characters of Johnny's remarkable friends are fleshed out in this novel to a much greater extent than they were in the previous two novels. Yo-less, a black kid, is less than pleased to find himself dubbed Sambo by the folks living in 1941, and the extremely forceful young Kirsten is almost as upset about being treated like a "little lady." Johnny, for his part, often finds himself putting his sanity at risk by contemplating the ways and whims of time travel. I found this book to be hilarious; the time travel part of the tale is a little wild and crazy, but hypotheses about the different legs of the Trousers of Time is vintage Pratchett material. Old Mrs. Tachyon is a wonderful character, seemingly rather insane based on her thought processes and tendency to spout gibberish all the time, she is perhaps more sane than anyone else around her; time traveling is enough to warp anyone's mind, Johnny reasons. I was rather delighted to hear Mrs. Tachyon mumble the words "Millennium hand and shrimp" at one point because these are the very same words often spoken by Foul Ole Ron on the Discworld. This adventure really is the type of thing you might expect to find on Pratchett's famous planetary creation, and I daresay any Discworld fan should enjoy t