Book Review: ASTRONUTS: Mission One: The Plant Planet! by John Scieszka and Steven Weinberg

Posted on December 12, 2019 at 11:30 am by Gene Ambaum

ASTRONUTS: Mission One: The Plant Planet! by John Scieszka and Steven Weinberg. Chronicle, 2019. 9781452171197. 220pp.

The AstroNuts are four experimental animal astronauts with superpowers: AlphaWolf, SmartHawk, LaserShark, and StinkBug. They blast off from their top-secret headquarters in Mount Rushmore, in a rocket that was disguised as Jefferson’s nose. Their mission: investigate a new Goldilocks planet, because on Earth we’ve crossed the BIG RED LINE and there’s more than 400 ppm of C02 in the atmosphere. They crash. They gather data. They entirely fail to see the intelligent, alien Giant Venus Flytrap right in front of them. Are they doomed? Not really. Is this a wacky, science-centric comedy for kids with an aside about how humans caused climate change? Yep.

Weinberg’s illustrations were constructed from public domain images from the Rijksmuseum and elsewhere. More info is available at www.astronuts.space