Today I am revisiting my very first blogs posts here and on my other blog Randomly Reading. It isn't because I haven't been reading, I have actually read lots of blogable books lately. I just thought it would be fun to see this again. And I still love it as much now as I did on all subsequent readings of it.So here's what I wrote on June 11, 2010:Life isn’t terribly exciting in Blackbury, England in 1996 until 21 May 1941, the night of the Blackberry Blitz and the destruction of Paradise Street, where 19 residents are killed. It all begins when 13 year old Johnny Maxwell and his friends find the local bag lady, Mrs. Tachyon, lying in an alley near her overturned shopping cart and her black plastic bags strewn about, blown from the past to the present by an unexploded bomb or UXB. Johnny does the right thing and calls an ambulance to take her to the hospital. And because he is a good kid, he takes her shopping cart, her bags and her demon cat Guilty home to store in his garage until Mrs. Tachyon can reclaim them. This incident begins Johnny’s foray in time travel, accompanied by his friends Yo-less, Bigmac, Wobbler and Kristy. As Mrs. Tachyon explains to Johnny when he visits her in the hospital “Them’s bags of time, mister man. Mind me bike! Where your mind goes, the rest of you’s bound to follow. Here today and gone tomorrow! Doing it’s the trick! eh?” (page 49) And because Johnny’s mind has been on his school project about the Blackbury Blitz that is exactly where Mrs. Tachyon’s bags of time take him and his friends.Travelling back in time, Johnny is not only faced with the dilemma of knowing what the result of the Blackury Blitz will be, but also with the possibility of changing its grim outcome. It is a classic fork in the road dilemma given a new twist, or as the mysterious Sir John, burger magnet and richest man in the world, presents it to his chauffeur in 1996 “Did you know that when you change time, you get two futures heading off side by side?...Like a pair of trousers.” (page 55-56)In 1941, Bigmac, a skinhead who finds cars with keys in the ignition irresistible, is arrested for stealing one and then accused of being a German spy. He manages to get away from the police by stealing one of their bicycles. Thanks to Bigmac, the group is forced to return to 1996 to escape. Unfortunately, when they get there, they discover that they have left Wobbler behind. Do they go back and return Wobbler to the present time? What leg of the trousers does history follow if they leave him in 1941? What leg of the trousers does history follow is they go back for Wobbler? And who is the mysterious Sir John and what does he have to do with everything?Johnny and the Bomb presents a number of interesting conundrums for the reader. Every fan of time travel stories knows the cardinal rule that if you manage to find a way to time travel, you must not change anything or you change the future. But doesn’t the very fact of your presence in a time you have traveled to constitute a change? So, can you change something and still have the same future result – more or less?Johnny and the Bomb was a well done, thoroughly enjoyable novel. It is the third book in the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy. The first two books are Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) and Johnny and the Dead. It was made into a movie by BBC in 2006 in the UK, but can be viewed in 10 minute increments on YouTube. Though a little different from the book, I still found it to be entertaining. Mrs. Tachyon was played by Zoë Wanamaker, who, as fans of the movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone will remember, was Madame Hooch, the flying instructor (among her other numerous excellent roles.)Speaking of the time traveling Mrs. Tachyon, there is an interesting concept in Physics called a tachyon. Essentially, a tachyon is an imaginary particle of ordinary matter that can travel faster than the speed of light, which means it can travel back in time.It seemed appropriate to begin this blog about World War II-themed books for young readers with a time travel novel, even if the focus is not directly about the war. Historical fiction is, after all, similar to Mrs. Tachyon’s bags of time, and the novels become a portal that can transport and return me to the time period under consideration.This book is recommended for readers age 9+This book was purchased for my personal library
2.5Pratchett has covered a lot of ground in this trilogy: aliens and war, ghosts and our connections to our past, and time-travel and, um, war again.Perhaps it's because, as I said in my review for Johnny and the Dead. I would pick ghosts over aliens - or time-travel - or perhaps that story just resonated more for me for some other reason, but it as definitely my favorite of the lot. I think this one would come in second.It didn't quite have the same level of humor or pathos has the second book, but a bit more than the first.But, aside from all that, I think my biggest issue with this book was the introduction of Kirsty. For one thing, it never really says where she came from. She's not in the previous books, not even in passing - at least not as far as I recall - but, in this one, she seems closer to Johnny than any of his other friends who were in the last two books.Speaking of which, I didn't feel like they were as present in this story. They were certainly relevant at times, but they felt more developed in the last book.Anyway - Kirsty. Kirsty is a very dominant presence, to the point where she sort of overshadows Johnny, who is rather passive. Next to Kirsty, Johnny seems even more passive than in the previous books.More to the point, though, she just never really clicked with me. She felt forced. I think she was meant to be - and she was, at times, especially when they went back in the past and she had to deal the casual sexism of the time, and also when, in conflict with Yo-less, she drops her own bit of casual racism and he has to drive the point home that she's just as bad with him and the other guys are with her... and we all learned a valuable lesson.(And I say that only half in jest, because it is a valuable lesson, but just felt a bit heavy-handed for Pratchett, who's usually better at digging the knife in a bit more subtley. Or, at least, amusingly.)Anyway - It was a decent read and I liked it well enough. It had it's moments - some really funny lines, some nice moments, some cool head-warping time-travel paradoxy things - but, overall, not my favorite of his works.ETA: I think that if I'd read this earlier, closer to its original publication date, or when I was younger, I would've been a bit more impressed with the head-bending stuff. As it is, it's something I've encountered enough times to be fairly familiar with it but, at the time of the writing, it was probably a bit fresher.
What do You think about Johnny And The Bomb (2007)?
The third book in Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell series starts out with a bang. Literally. A bomb has fallen in the midst of Johnny's city. But the bomb dropped in World War II. Johnny discovers the history of the bomb and can't stop thinking about the people affected by it. One of the people affected by it ends up in Johnny's time -- the local bag lady, who is so mentally and temporally displaced that sometimes her body follows along.Johnny and one of his friends help the lady get to the hospital, and take custody of her shopping cart, which holds strange bags of lumpy stuff. The lumpy stuff has some confusing temporal properties, causing Johnny and some of his friends end up skittering back and forth in time to the moments before the bomb.Of course they have to try to save the day.Once again, the conversations between Johnny and his friends are absolutely hilarious, as they try to reason out the universe using the little facts that they almost know and barely mis-remember.
—Jared
You know a book is good when you can't put it down even when you're rereading it. My original review is below.=========In my favorite of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, Johnny crosses paths with Mrs. Tachyon, a bag lady who also is a time traveller. He and his friends travel back to WWII in their town with the predictable changing of time that must be fixed. However, instead of simply changing time back to its previous path, Johnny wants to prevent a bomb wiping out Paradise Street in the middle of the night. This necessitates a lot of maneuvering by the kids with the usual humorous Pratchett twists and turns along the way. I was surprised at what a page turner it became by the end as I stayed up way past bedtime to get Johnny and his pals home again. Here's a favorite bit of dialogue to tide you over until you can find the book which is out of print. In the shopping mall, a joke was going wrong. "Make me .. er," said Bigmac, "make me one with pickle and onion rings and fries." "Make me one with extra salad and fries, please," said Yo-less. Wobbler took a long look at the girl in the cardboard hat. "Make me one with everything," he said. "Because ... I'm going to become a Muslim!" Bigmac and Yo-less exchanged glances. "Buddhist," said Yo-less, patiently. "It's Buddhist! Make me one with everything because I'm going to become a Buddhist! It's Buddhists that want to be one with everything. Singing 'om' and all that. You mucked it up! You were practising all the way down here and you still mucked it up!" "Buddhists wouldn't have the burger," said the girl. "They'd have the Jumbo Beanburger. Or just fries and a salad." They stared at her. "Vegetarianism," said the girl. "I may have to wear a paper hat but I haven't got a cardboard brain, thank you." She glared at Wobbler. "You want a bun with everything. You want fries with that?"
—Julie Davis
Amazingly, this book took eleven years from its UK publication to be published in the US, appearing here in 2007. The version I read was the US one, whose Americanization has its dumber moments: I did at least a triple take when there was mention of the High Street being littered with, among other typical items, empty "chip packets". Just to add to the conceptual confusion, later in the book at least one discarded packet of fish and chips played a minor role; I had to be grateful for the small m
—John
