By Ben Grimley and Annie Grimley
Kindle Edition Available
Product Description (from Amazon)
While boldly sneaking aboard the final flight of the U.S.S. Explorer with her cat, Pickle, twelve-year-old Andromeda Starwell finds herself on an unexpected journey--to the Moon! Stranded on Apollo Research Base, the young stowaway barely has time to miss home when the lunar colony becomes the scene of a mysterious theft. The prized Lavalight Crystal has been whisked away under the very noses of Base Security without a trace--no clues, no suspect, no hope of solving the crime. Worse, in the wrong hands, the Crystal has the power to wreck the entire colony! With Inspector Ride's official investigation going nowhere, Andromeda teams up with her brilliant but flaky, daydreaming classmate, Pixie, and a double-dealing, four-armed robot, Rad. Together, they must thwart a diabolical plot to melt Apollo Base into a puddle of molten moondust. And, in between moondiving, rocketboarding, meteorite dodging, and low-gravity food fighting, Andromeda still has to figure out a way to get home...
Ben Grimley founded PBS KIDS Mobile at PBS, where his team received honors including a Parents' Choice Gold Award, Teachers' Choice Award and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for work in educational media. He continues to work on educational apps for kids of all ages, with a particular passion for math and science games. He also has a penchant for writing poems about the moon and for sneaking midnight snacks. Andromeda's Moon is his first novel.
Annie Grimley is his 12 year old daughter.
I have a love/hate relationship with the mystery genre. I love watching the logic of who done it, and trying to stay one step ahead of the mystery solvers. However, I hate it when the mystery solvers are sticking their noses where they don’t belong, especially if the mystery solvers are kids, and there is someone else supposed to be solving this mystery. If they make the person who is supposed to be solving the case look petty and incompetent, I like it even less.
This book fell firmly into that category. There were times when I put it down and I almost didn’t return. The only thing that kept me coming back was a desire to know if my suspicion about who the villain was was correct. I had had the guy picked out for the villain the moment they introduced him. I was correct, by the way, but I won’t tell you who it was. You can figure it out for yourself.
This book was advertised as being full of hilarious moments … and I suppose it is … if your idea of hilarious is getting laughs from someone else’s pain. There were moments I did laugh, but most of the time I just cringed or rolled my eyes. Mom says I talked to this book a lot.
I had no love for the main character, Andromeda, and very little sympathy for her plight. The reason for her getting stuck on the space ship was her own fault. She was being disrespectful of authority, especially of her father. She probably could have avoided getting trapped on that space ship by simply not taking her cat with her. That cat did NOTHING for the story, other than getting her trapped on the space ship, and I would frankly like to know how she zip-corded while carrying a cat cage. My mental image just falls short. I did finally figure out why the cat came though. You see, this was a co-write and one of the authors was a twelve year-old girl. Every twelve-year-old girl has her favorite animal, Annie’s just happens to be a cat, and obviously the cat just had to come along as a result,
Andromeda, or Andrie as she was often called, reminded me of a spoiled brat. She was manipulative, conniving, disrespectful and all around left me with an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. The only thing that ever induced me to feel sorry for her was when it was revealed that her mother got lost on the far side of the moon. There was only one thing that she did that I at all applauded was when she stood up for a girl who was being teased.
This book is also advertised as being scientifically accurate, as it was reviewed by someone from NASA. I’m sure that, on all of those points it probably was. However, something I always wondered was why technology is so much more advanced on the moon than it is on earth. I can understand why the stuff that involves people not weighing as much would not be on earth, but I would have thought that the classrooms on earth would have much of the same technology as does the ones on earth, especially Andrie’s school, as she just struck me as someone who runs in high technology circles. I mean, her dad designed the rocket she rode on!
Now, this wasn’t a bad book, and I did eventually come back every time I put it down, and I probably would read a sequel if one came out, but there were a lot of things that left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe a twelve-year-old who goes to a public schoool wouldn’t have a problem with it, but I, a homeschooled 17 year old, did.
Reading Level: CHILD - children's literature
Profanity: LOW - few mildly offensive words, all from one guy who only appears in the beginning and towards the end.
Sexuality: NONE – except for when Andrie knees one guy where it counts, and some other s joke that if she prevented him from ever having kids, she had done the world a favor. Honestly, I think that should have been left out considering the intended audience.
Other:
There were a lot of “Accidents” by one character, Harry. There was one kid who was the brunt of many practical jokes, which could have been left out. Andrie and her friends face quite a few near-death encounters. Andrie disobeys a LOT.
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