Too Much Space!

If you’ve never met Beep and Bob before, you’re in for a real treat when you read Jonathan Roth’s Too Much Space!

Bob is a new student at Astro Elementary, which is a school in orbit around “one of the outer planets.” Beep is an alien who was separated from his 600 siblings while playing hide and seek. The two friends came together when Bob found Beep knocking on the space station’s airlock door. Bob let Beep in, and now Beep thinks that Bob is his mother!

Too Much Space! is told through Bob’s “Splog entries” (Space Blog entries that Bob is required to write for class). Bob is struggling with his new school—not because of the work or trouble meeting new friends, but because he is terrified of space.

This is a problem. Not only does Bob live on a space station and attend a school that is orbiting a planet, but his class regularly takes field trips into space on the space bus. Each time the class travels to new destinations, the students are required to pull on their space suits and float into space to explore.

These trips into space provide plenty of entertainment and humor for readers. On a class trip to Pluto, Bob discovers that one of his classmates, Lani, keeps three spiders as pets. Lani brings her pet spiders on the class trips as experiments. Unfortunately, Bob is afraid of spiders too. He faints when he sees Lani’s pets. A class bully discovers Bob’s arachnophobia and uses it to torment him in a most unusual way!

Too Much Space! was loads of fun to read. My six-year-old and I laughed at Bob’s antics as he searched for ways to avoid going into space. We were on the edge of our seats at times. My daughter covered her face and wailed “I have to know what happens next” each time we hit a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter and had to stop for the night.

This is a definite “must read” for any young chapter book reader! As a bonus, the last two pages of Too Much Space! have fascinating facts about Pluto.

I received an advance reader copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review. But we’re headed to the store for more adventures of Beep and Bob!

Have you read any great books lately?