Forty-Two

The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, and Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett are three great young-adult novels. They are getting a little dated, but I still handed them over to my godson A.J. when I was done because I’m so sure he’ll like them. It has it all from adventure and excitement to kids knowing more than adults to the supernatural. What more could you want?

The first novel, Only You Can Save Mankind, is about the protagonist Johnny Maxwell who is eleven or twelve, and he gets a video game from his computer-hacker-wannabe friend and starts playing it. It’s the classic kill-em-all game against space invaders and he’s doing ok until the aliens say they want to surrender. Then it all gets a little weird. It’s a great story and a great message. I liked it a lot.

Johnny and the Dead, the second novel in the series, is also great. After the story of the first book has ended and some time has passed, Johnny frequently walks home past the cemetery that is going to be displaced by some modern buildings and starts to see ghosts… err… post-alive persons. When they find out what is going to happen to the cemetery, all kinds of things start to occur. Not quite zombies, but still a lot of good stuff!

The third novel, Johnny and the Bomb, involves some time travel to Johnny’s town in England during WWII. His interest in what happened there back then seems to have helped influence the time travel path his friends and himself find themselves on, but then when they make a mistake and one of their friends can’t make it back to their time, what do they do? It’s a great take on the time travel paradox and a really entertaining read.

Terry Pratchett, as usual, is awesome in his story-telling and he adds a lot of great lessons on the way, such as race and gender issues from the past to the present, crime and prejudice issues, and the psychology of “winning” as a goal as well. The first novel’s period take on computers and video games is a fun retrospective as well. Although the novels are well written and make a great story, they read a little young for the average adult reader. For a young adult, age 10 to 13 or so, I would think they would be awesome. The kids are really in charge, can pretty much do anything they want, and they make a lot of good choices although not always necessarily on purpose, and they are a lot of fun. Still highly recommended. It is Pratchett after all.