by Moe Zilla

Created on: August 16, 2010

"Can I pleeaase have some milk and a Moon Pie?"

Jimmy's mother isn't budging, but by the second page, Jimmy's found another plan. Sitting in a homemade toy car that he's made from a wooden crate, Jimmy wishes "I could go to the moon and get my own Moon Pies..." And suddenly the wood begins to shake, rattle, and lift up off the ground. By page three, Jimmy is looking down through the clouds at the globe below him - while a crescent moon smiles (wearing a stocking cap, and spectacles on its pointy nose).

"Up ahead loomed the slumbering moon," writes Tony DiTerlizzi.

"Mmm! Moon pies," thinks Jimmy...

It's a breathtaking opening to a beautifully-illustrated book. Author-illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi "loves Moon Pies," according to the book's jacket, "but he loves illustrated books even more." As a child he was inspired by the lush paintings of Maxfield Parrish, and now "he may look older, but he's still a kid at heart." He's even drawn illustrations for games like Magic: the Gathering and some newer campaigns for the official line of Dungeons and Dragons games.

He fills each page with lots of fantasy and fun. By the fourth illustration, little Jimmy is standing on the tip of that crescent moon - "the great Moon Pie maker in the sky" - where his only problem is that the moon's hard of hearing. ("What? You want french fries? Don't have any... Fruit flies? Never seen one...")  But turn the page, and the moon has heard and understood Jimmy's request - and he's loaded up his flying wooden crate with a pile of crates filled with a thousand moon pies.

I remember, when I was a child, seeing the crescent moon drawn as the face of a kindly old man, and it's nice to see someone's resurrected the character for an original children's fantasy.  The lavish drawings almost make this an instant classic, and children should be intrigued by the pictures of Jimmy flying through the sky. The kindly old moon offers a warning about The Grimble Grinder (who frightened off the cow who jumps over the moon). But Jimmy's determined to find some milk before he escorts all his moon pies home, and he scoops up a few bottles in a net as he flies over the milky way - under an enormous red planet labeled Mars.

This book is a lot of fun, and I recommend it for children and adults - and for anyone who'd enjoy a story about finally getting to meet that man in the moon. It gets a little rambly and scarier at the end, when the boy crash-lands on Mars, and has to confront an enormous green monster with purple Cheshire-cat stripes that go all the way down to its tail. But fortunately, all the monster wants is a moon pie - and fortunately, Jimmy has one!

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