Book Review: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed that since the last few books have put us in a bit of a rut. The Jungle, Nickel Boys, and The Ancient Eight have all been disappointing for various reasons. For my next read, I decided I needed to lower the stakes. I wanted to find something fun, light, and fresh. Preferring to get my kicks via unaffiliated sci-fi, I picked up John Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

And might have just found my book of the year.

I've read Scalzi before. Redshirts, which put him on the map, is an outstanding read. The Kaiju Preservation Society, which sounds like the perfect book for me, was meh (you can find that review on this site...somewhere). So I had an idea of what I was getting into - a writer with great ideas who is at least capable of seeing it through.

For When the Moon Hits Your Eye, here's the great idea:

One day the moon turns into cheese.

That's it. And it's brilliant!

This could have been "We need to find out who did this!" Except...nobody did anything, it just kind of happened. This could have been "We've got to stop this before it destroys the Earth!" There's a tinge of that in the second half of the book, but it very quickly turns into resignation that there's nothing that can be done about an extinction-level event.

No, this book is about all kinds of people coming to grips with something completely unexplainable all in their own ways. Yes, there's chapters from the points of view of the President, and of NASA astronauts. But there's also a local Evangelical church in Iowa trying to determine whether to ascribe this to the devil. There's the piddling science writer whose book titled That's No Moon just happened to come out the week of the cheese change, sky-rocketing him up the best-seller list. There's the impetuous millionaire hiring black-market dealers to secure former moon rocks so he can be the first to eat moon cheese. My favorite is the chapter following the Hollywood studio head as she sits through an entire day being pitched movies about the moon ("It's like Willy Wonka...but with cheese.").

This book is a very high-level study about how we deal with absolutely impossible things that happen nevertheless (which seems to happen more and more these days), and includes an observant and depressing epilogue on how people tend to deal with them once enough time has passed. But don't get me wrong, as intelligent as this book is, this book is also FUN! I highly recommend it - perfect beach read AND makes you smarter! Nine out of ten hot dogs!