The Daily Booktalk: Middle Grade Monday: See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng

See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng.

This might be familiar to those who regularly read my blog, but I featured it in my daily booktalk on my web page, which I replicate here.

See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng 


Eleven-year-old Alex Petrosky is obsessed with outer space in general and the interstellar journey of the two Voyager spacecrafts and their payload - the Golden Records. He decided to launch his own rocket and place a golden iPod on board to update any intelligent beings out there about life on Earth. The book is the transcript of Alex's iPod recordings. I read the book with my ears, so I guess I was listening to the "actual" iPod recordings. The story is essentially Alex's road trip - first from Colorado to New Mexico, where he intended to launch his rocket at a rocketry festival called SHARF. While there, he receives a message from Ancestry.com (another interest of his) that provides an address for a man with his father's name and birth date. His father is dead, but Alex decides to head to Las Vegas to investigate this mystery.