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Book Reviewed by:New York Times bestseller John Scalzi flies you to the moon with his most fantastic tale to date: When the Moon Hits Your Eye.
The moon has turned into cheese.
Now humanity has to deal with it.
For some it's an opportunity. For others it's a moment to question their faith: In God, in science, in everything. Still others try to keep the world running in the face of absurdity and uncertainty. And then there are the billions looking to the sky and wondering how a thing that was always just there is now... something absolutely impossible.
Astronauts and billionaires, comedians and bank executives, professors and presidents, teenagers and terminal patients at the end of their lives -- over the length of an entire lunar cycle, each get their moment in the moonlight. To panic, to plan, to wonder and to pray, to laugh and to grieve. All in a kaleidoscopic novel that goes all the places you'd expect, and then to so many places you wouldn't.
It's a wild moonage daydream. Ride this rocket.
Wapakoneta, Ohio | The Armstrong Air and Space Museum
Virgil Augustine's cell phone rang just as he was reaching for his coat to go home. It was Bud Roldan, the facilities director for the museum. "You still in the building, Virgil?" Bud asked.
"Just barely," Virgil said. Tonight was the weekly date night for Virgil and Emily Augustine; they would pay their teenage daughter, Libby, to watch her twin brothers, which Virgil knew meant she would be in the living room texting her friends while Andy and Hunter played video games in the basement, and Emily and he would have either Mexican or Chinese food and then watch whatever was showing at the Wapa Cinema. This week it was some animated movie involving waterfowl. This is what passed for romance when you were middle-aged and living in small-town Ohio, and Virgil was not one to miss it. "What is it, Bud?"
"Well, it's…" Bud trailed off, and Virgil waited, eyeing the door of his office, yearning for escape. "You should probably just come ...
One day, without warning, the moon turns into a giant ball of cheese. Every piece of moon rock on Earth turns with it. Nobody knows why, and there is the general understanding that nobody would be able to find a satisfying answer if they went looking for one. What would you do in that situation, faced with such a grand cosmic joke? When the Moon Hits Your Eye is a series of vignettes starring a Magnolia-sized ensemble, including (but by no means limited to) an ex-professor of philosophy, a tech billionaire, several astronauts, a sex worker turned real estate agent, and the employees of two rival cheese shops in Madison, Wisconsin. The novel is at its most compelling in the first half as it hops from person to person, presenting a gestalt of American society as it tries to accommodate such a monumentally bizarre occurrence...continued
Full Review
(514 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
While the central conceit of John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye is that the Moon has turned to cheese, the book is not overly concerned with how this has happened. Instead, it's more interested in how the world — specifically America — reacts to such a sudden, inexplicable event, as well as what happens when science takes its natural course. If something with the size and mass of the Moon were made of an organic compound like cheese rather than rock, it would immediately start to implode, launching geysers and huge chunks of cheese into space — and, unfortunately for us Earthlings, directly at our planet.
Cold, hard science has never gotten in the way of folklore before, however, and the Moon being made of ...
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