Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon by Richard Roberts {Blog Tour: Review}

*Received a free copy in exchange for an honest review

Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon, by Richard Roberts

Genre: middle-grade, science-fiction, superhero action-adventure

Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press

Date of Publication: January 29, 2015

Cover Artist: Ricky Gunawan

Blurb~

Supervillains do not merely play hooky.

True, coming back to school after a month spent fighting - and defeating - adult superheroes is a bit of a comedown for the Inscrutable Machine.  When offered the chance to skip school in the most dramatic way possible, Penelope Akk can’t resist. With the help of a giant spider and mysterious red goo, she builds a spaceship and flies to Jupiter.

Mutant goats.

Secret human colonies.

A war between three alien races with humanity as the prize.

Robot overlords and evil plots.

Penny and her friends find all this and more on Jupiter’s moons, but what they don’t find are any heroes to save the day. Fortunately, they have an angry eleven year old and a whole lot of mad science…

Helpful Links: Goodreads | Amazon US | Amazon UK

My Review~

Where do I start with Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon? There is definitely a lot going on with this story. You have supervillains, superheroes, mutant goats, and other weird things, plus powers that are out of this world and characters that rival those powers.  

And that doesn't even begin to cover everything. From the minute you pick up Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon you are transported to another time. To Earth in a very far far future where there are superheroes and supervillains, wearing disguises trying to live a normal life. 

Well most of them are. Then you have Bad Penny and her little gang of misfits. And I do mean misfits they are definitely an interesting group to say the least. They work well together as a team throughout the story and you really get a feel for who they are as "supervillains." I use this word loosely because as the story unfolds you find that they are really more like superheroes than villains. And that is not a bad thing. Though they do come up with some pretty off the wall inventions. Yikes. Some of them I would not want to come face to face with. 

Bad Penny and her friends all yearn to go out in the world and leave their mark. To have everyone know who they are and what they are capable of. Needless to say with some underground help they are given the chance to do just that. And boy do they leave a mark!

Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon is a story full of action, science, and technology that rivals the old 80's movie Weird Science. The overall story was fun and peeked my curiosity, but unfortunately the author lost me with a lot of technology speak that really took me out of the story. There were a lot of moments that I really just didn't think made sense and left me feeling lost. 

I wish I had liked this book more because the premise is great. I really loved the idea of Bad Penny and her friends, but in the end I think all the weird powers and mad science was just a little too much for me. But just because it is not my story doesn't mean it's not yours. It has all the elements there to be a great story for someone. I'm just not that someone. 

In the end Please Don't Tell My Parents I Blew Up The Moon gave me a chuckle and made me realize that I really want to see Bad Penny's power in action. It sounds both creepy and fantastic, it was a fun read once I got past the tech speak.

About the Author~

Richard Roberts has fit into only one category in his entire life, and that is ‘writer’, but as a writer he’d throw himself out of his own books for being a cliche. 
He’s had the classic wandering employment history - degree in entomology, worked in health care, been an administrator and labored for years in the front lines of fast food. He’s had the appropriate really weird jobs, like breeding tarantulas and translating English to English for Japanese television. He wears all black, all the time, is manic-depressive, and has a creepy laugh. 
He’s also followed the classic writer’s path, the pink slips, the anthology submissions, the desperate scrounging to learn how an ever-changing system works. He’s been writing from childhood, and had the appropriate horrible relationships that damaged his self-confidence for years. Then out of nowhere Curiosity Quills Press demanded he give them his books, and here he is. 
As for what he writes, Richard loves children and the gothic aesthetic. Most everything he writes will involve one or the other, and occasionally both. His fantasy is heavily influenced by folk tales, fairy tales, and mythology, and he likes to make the old new again. In particular, he loves to pull his readers into strange characters with strange lives, and his heroes are rarely heroic.

Find Him: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads