Reviews for Johnny and the Bomb (Johnny Maxwell Trilogy #3)

The average rating for Johnny and the Bomb (Johnny Maxwell Trilogy #3) based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-24 00:00:00 David Earnhardt This third volume in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy is the most ambitious, tackling the subject of time travel in a funny and at the same time thoughtful way. Johnny and his friends find the bag lady Mrs. Tachyon apparently mugged on the street, and in getting her medical care are stuck with her shopping cart full of squishy, disturbingly motile garbage bags. The thing is, her bags are apparently stuffed with Time, and in messing with them, Johnny and Kirsty (who keeps changing her name) and then the others are transported in time. (Mrs. Tachyon, right?) There's some humorous comings and goings for a bit, but the main story focuses on something Johnny's been studying for a school project, the WWII bombing of a street in their town. Because the air raid siren failed to go off, nineteen people were killed. When their time travel takes them back to the day of the raid, Johnny wonders if there isn't some way to stop that happening. The actual mechanics of time travel are more played for laughs than actually thought out, though they hold together fairly well, and Pratchett only "cheats" (in the sense of deviating from the rules he's created) once. That once is really only credible because you want it to succeed, not because it makes a lot of sense. But the resolution of the plot is extremely satisfying, the more so because Johnny's friends Bigmac, Wobbler, and Yo-less are as involved as Johnny is. Here in particular we see elements of Pratchett's Discworld novels, in particular the Trousers of Time concept and Mrs. Tachyon's repetition of the phrase "millennium hand and shrimp." I took this to be a cute nod to adult readers who'd be familiar with Sam Vimes and Foul Ole Ron and was amused by it. I also liked that Pratchett was willing to alter history, and that Johnny's attitude was that we alter the future all the time by the actions we take. His messing around in the continuum left the future a better place, changing a lot of lives, including one Johnny never thought was in question. I'm not sure I'll come back to this series the way I do several of the Discworld novels, but I enjoyed this very much and intend to pass it along to my children.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-02-10 00:00:00 Nikolas Porter I've always been a fan of Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell series - they were written and published during what I'd consider to be his golden years, and what's interesting about the Johnny Maxwell books is that they're set in our reality. In this book, Johnny and his friends take a trip back in time after finding a magic, time-travelling trolley that belongs to the local bag lady. That allows Pratchett to experiment with genre, by writing a sort of realistic fantasy, which has some grounding in historical fact - it takes you back to the Second World War, albeit in the fictional town of Blackbury. It's a lot of fun, because Pratchett plays around with cause and effect, and shows us his own bastardised version of the butterfly effect. He also talks about the trousers of time, a concept which I think he also used in the Discworld. And the crazy bag lady said "Millenium hand and shrimp", which might sound familiar. Overall, I have a lot of love for the Johnny Maxwell series, and this was probably my second favourite so far. So read it!