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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best book in Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell series, 25 Mar 2003
In my opinion, Johnny and the Bomb is the best book in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell trilogy. While classified as juvenile fiction, this book bears the strongest resemblance of the three to Pratchett’s Discworld ideas and characterizations, containing much more social commentary, satire, and sidesplitting comedy than Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead. For such a normal twelve-year-old kid, Johnny Maxwell has some amazing adventures. This time around, he becomes a time traveler. Old Mrs. Tachyon, whom we have met briefly earlier in the series, is now revealed to be something more than a crazy bag lady; she is a time-traveling crazy bag lady. When she turns up injured, Johnny and his friends summon an ambulance for her and take her trolley cart (complete with her ornery cat Guilty) to Johnny’s garage for safe keeping. Johnny notices that some of her bags seem to move of their own accord at times, and this discovery quickly leads to an episode of quite unexpected time travel.The characters of Johnny’s remarkable friends are fleshed out in this novel to a much greater extent than they were in the previous two novels. Yo-less, a black kid, is less than pleased to find himself dubbed Sambo by the folks living in 1941, and the extremely forceful young Kirsten is almost as upset about being treated like a “little lady.” Johnny, for his part, often finds himself putting his sanity at risk by contemplating the ways and whims of time travel. I found this book to be hilarious; the time travel part of the tale is a little wild and crazy, but hypotheses about the different legs of the Trousers of Time is vintage Pratchett material. Old Mrs. Tachyon is a wonderful character, seemingly rather insane based on her thought processes and tendency to spout gibberish all the time, she is perhaps more sane than anyone else around her; time traveling is enough to warp anyone’s mind, Johnny reasons. I was rather delighted to hear Mrs. Tachyon mumble the words “Millennium hand and shrimp” at one point because these are the very same words often spoken by Foul Ole Ron on the Discworld. This adventure really is the type of thing you might expect to find on Pratchett’s famous planetary creation, and I daresay any Discworld fan should enjoy this book immensely. I find myself wishing for more Johnny Maxwell stories; I feel as if I know these characters now, and they are a fascinating, increasingly funny bunch of guys to hang around with.
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by Terry Pratchett
by Terry Pratchett
by Terry Pratchett
by Terry Pratchett
![Johnny And The Bomb [DVD] [2006]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51WmUFIkhsL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Roy Brandon
