While the idea of humanity's weaknesses making "aliens" uncomfortable is hardly new, the way Coville approaches it is refreshing and exciting. The aliens are trying to determine if Earth is worth preserving, or if humans are far too immature and need to be annihilated before we figure out interstellar travel.
What I like about this series is that it pushes into some areas that, as far as kid lit is usually concerned, don't feel comfortable. Smith is actually an alien who abducted the original teacher and is now trying to find a representative sample of students to bring with him to outer space-hence his need to disguise himself as an elementary school teacher. My Teacher works well as it's a story in which Susan has to defeat the new substitute teacher, a guy named Mr. Coville wrote the kinds of stories that I enjoyed-science fiction, some horror (kid horror, of course, being spooky stories and nothing more), and a good dose of fantasy-and it's clear that my kids like his stuff, too. Sadly, there aren't audiobooks for the third and fourth entries in the series, so though I'm excited my boys have now listened to the first two ( My Teacher is an Alien and My Teacher Fried My Brains), I don't quite know how to handle getting the next half of the series into their imaginations.Īs far as books go, they're pretty standard Bruce Coville fare, which is to say that they're brisk, well written, interesting stories about kids working hard to overcome difficult things in their lives. I loved those four books as a kid, with the last one, My Teacher Flunked the Planet being one of the first novels that ever moved me to reconsider what I understood about the world.
You can imagine, then, my excitement when I saw that the first two books in the My Teacher is an Alien series by Bruce Coville showed up in my digital library. We read some Dragonriders of Pern, the Prydain Chronicles, and some other parts that really fit in with what I loved reading as a kid. So I began to cull my memories for stories that I remember liking. It wasn't that it was bad, it just wasn't age appropriate. I tried listening to a Brandon Sanderson book, Steelheart, and was only a few minutes in before I realized I didn't want my then-four year old to be listening to the story.
It's that, though I read a lot of books as a kid, not all of them-in fact, precious few-have audiobook components. It isn't that there aren't plenty of books-and plenty that I'm eager to read, at that-prepared for audio consumption that wouldn't make for a great addition to my "have read" list. This ended up being true, with one caveat I hadn't anticipated: I would run out of kid-appropriate books that I knew of. When I first moved to New Place, I was excited because it meant that I would have a good hour of total commute time every day-about thirty minutes each way, maybe a bit longer-and that meant I could listen to five or more hours of books every day.
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