Name: Johnny and the Bomb
Rating: 3.444444444444445 (18 reviews)
ISBN: 9780060541910

Terry Pratchett

Thirteen-year-old Johnny Maxwell acquires the neighborhood homeless woman's shopping cart when she is injured and discovers that its contents have the ability to send him back in time from 1996 to 1941 England.

Johnny and the Bomb

After twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell suddenly starts seeing and talking to ghosts, he and his friends become involved in a battle to save the local cemetery.

Johnny and the Dead

Kirsten Simkiss

This book is very different from the first book, in that it doesn’t have the same story line. While the first book revolves around Johnny and video game aliens choosing him as their escort, this book is about the same Johnny Maxwell, just with the power to see and speak to the dead. Honestly, the shift of story really surprised me.

While you still have diversity of background and race in this book, it feels lacking in female characters. There are three named in the entire novel, alongside ten to fifteen male characters.

All in all, I found this book to be quite slow. The moral of this story seems to be that cemeteries are for the living, not the dead, though they take an eternity getting to that understanding. I’m not sure I would recommend this book to others, but it isn’t a bad book by any means.

This one is my least favorite of the trilogy, but then I'm usually pretty fussy about time travel. These books have been slower than I'd hoped, and with the added frustration of the character having a new super power every book, this one definitely wasn't my cup of tea. Generally speaking, time travel is a complicated thing. To have a woman with dementia using trash bags full of time in a stolen Tesco's parking lot with a feral cat named Guilty was a step too far for me, I think.

Johnny and the Bomb

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