Nate Turner loves comic books, hates school, and is friends with one of the weirdest kids around: Tommy Rocket. Tommy, though wheelchair-bound, has used his impressive smarts (and a lot of help from his robotics-engineer dad) to build machines that get him into all kinds of trouble—including some semi-sentient AI friends collectively dubbed the Goober Patrol. Though they manage to avoid the unwanted attentions of schoolyard bullies, Nate and Tommy are soon faced with a far greater challenge: discovering the identity of the individual who’s been tampering with Tommy’s robots and trying to steal the cutting-edge microchips inside.
Thomas Kuhn’s TOMMY ROCKET AND THE GOOBER PATROL has a strong sense of vision. It’s an odd vision—a kind of retro-futurism, in which the ambience (with some uncomfortable associated mores) is 1950s Americana and yet the technology rides the cutting edge of the 21st century—but, overall, it works. Despite some of its ludicrous propositions, TOMMY ROCKET does an excellent job of keeping its focus on two boys capering about, getting into trouble, and avoiding their homework. It does so with a quirky, old-timey tone and sense of humor. At times, this tone feels too “adult,” but it’s hard not to laugh when the narrator drawls, “The minutes passed like kidney stones—slow and painful.” Sometimes this humor even feels meta-textual: when Nate must descend into the sewers he describes “a cylindrical section rife with slugs, spiders, snakes, centipedes and slime” before quipping, “And if all that didn’t kill me, the alliteration would.” Some of this is a stretch for the overall subject matter and reading-level of the text, but most readers will be too busy keeping track of the clumsy robots and absurdly regimented gangs of kids to mind.
The over-reliance on a whole-cloth backdrop of mid-century Americana does have its pitfalls—mainly in that TOMMY ROCKET misses some important storytelling opportunities and falls behind its contemporary peers in terms of interest and complexity. There’s something deeply out-of-step, for instance, with Tommy’s mother: a woman married to a robotics engineer, with a wheelchair-using son who can build robots on his own, she remains a mostly invisible housewife who cleans and bakes in her spare time. (It’s never questioned why a family has a robotic lawnmower and a fleet of small robots, but still depends on a woman for traditionally gendered household labor.)
There’s also a surprising silence about Nate and Tommy: the occasional illustrations portray Nate as Black and Tommy as white, but this is never mentioned in the text itself. Whatever specific decade TOMMY ROCKET is set in, this type of friendship would likely warrant some comment, especially since their households (white, privileged, nuclear family, highly educated professional at head; and Black, undefined professional life, multiple generations, and relations sharing one apartment) differ so dramatically. Under the broad umbrella of children’s literature, TOMMY ROCKET sits a little uncomfortably on the cusp of middle grade fiction and YA. The characters’ ages, some of the subject matter, and the complexity of the vocabulary lean towards the latter, but the bright tone and overall simplistic treatment of its subject matter tend towards the former.
A clearer vision of the intended audience could profitably guide some different storytelling and editing decisions. But as it stands, TOMMY ROCKET AND THE GOOBER PATROL is still a solid enough romp through nostalgic American boyhood—albeit a highly traditional one that may not appeal as much to young readers today.
Thomas Kuhn’s TOMMY ROCKET AND THE GOOBER PATROL overall maintains the light, adventurous tone of American childhood stories.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader