Gr 4-6-Using only transcripts of podcast recordings to tell a story might be limiting for most narratives, but here it allows 11-year-old Alex Petroski's naïveté and essentially optimistic and ethical nature to come shining through as he tells of his road trip with his dog, Carl Sagan. The decision to travel to SHARF (Southwest High Altitude Rocket Festival), near Albuquerque, NM, is as matter-of-fact as his choice to address his posts to possible extraterrestrials, who he hopes will find his iPod and figure out how things work on Earth. Alex's mother is clearly less than competent, and his distant brother, Ronnie, lives in Los Angeles, which allows Alex to pursue his intense interest in space and rockets unsupervised. Things go awry from the start, but various helpful characters come to his rescue, enabling Alex to continue his journey away from Rockview, CO, and eventually return to the town. He's an intelligent, likable kid, and readers will enjoy following his journey as he learns who is in his corner when the chips are down. It is eventually revealed that his mother has a mental illness, which shines light on the workings of their relationships and explains how Alex has come to be so self-sufficient. VERDICT A smart read with some serious themes. Give to tweens who love unusual realistic fiction.-Carol A. Edwards, formerly at Denver Public Library © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

ON BOARD THE Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, launched by NASA nearly 40 years ago, is the Golden Record. This disc contains images and sounds from Earth, things like the wind, thunder, bird songs, whale songs, music, laughter and human greetings in many languages. A message in a bottle released into "the cosmic ocean," as the astronomer Carl Sagan described it, the Golden Record is meant to convey a sense of life on Earth to intelligent creatures in space. Alex Petroski admires Carl Sagan so much he named his dog after him. He's making his own Golden Record - a Golden iPod - to launch into space on the Voyager 3, a rocket he is building. Alex narrates his story to an imagined audience of "intelligent beings millions of light-years away." This narration - intercut with the voices of others when Alex is unable to record - makes up the entire text of Jack Cheng's debut novel, "See You in the Cosmos," a strategy that works beautifully thanks to the charm, directness and subtle emotion of Alex's voice. Alex is an unusual boy who lives alone with his mother in Colorado. She has "quiet days" that she spends lying on the sofa watching TV, staring at the ceiling, or disappearing on long walks through their suburban subdivision. Eleven-year-old Alex does the grocery shopping and cooking. His 24-year-old brother, Ronnie, a sports agent in Los Angeles, sends money when he can, and for extra income Alex has a part-time job at a gas station. Alex thinks a lot about his father, who died when he was 3. Ronnie tells him to "forget about Dad," but Alex can't, so he joins Ancestry.com to find out more. But his first priority is getting to the Southwest High-Altitude Rocket Festival, or SHARF, a contest held in the desert in New Mexico. There he hopes to launch the Voyager 3 into space with the Golden iPod on board. On the way to the festival he is befriended by two fellow rocket enthusiasts, Zed and Steve. They are roommates and seem to be in their early 20s, which is useful because they can drive Alex around and help him with things like setting up his tent. In fact, except for Alex, almost all of the characters are adults, which is unusual for a middle-grade novel. This can feel a bit like cheating, since, as a rule, we like our child heroes to solve their problems by themselves, and Alex uses adults to do things a child can't (like driving). But Alex is at least as responsible as the adults around him. At the same time, his responsibilities and his unusual mind isolate him from children his own age. A boy with no father and a strange mother may seem pitiful to his peers at school, but the adults Alex meets admire his courage, honesty and resourcefulness, which brings those qualities to the foreground and allows young readers to admire them, too. Zed and Steve are with Alex when he gets a message from Ancestry.com: A man with the same name and birth date as his father's has turned up in Las Vegas. Could his father still be alive somehow, and living in Nevada? As the three set out for Las Vegas to solve the mystery, Alex recounts the road trip's joys and catastrophes to his unseen, unknown audience of extraterrestrials. What are these aliens like? "Do you have light brown skin like I do or smooth gray skin like a dolphin or spiky green skin like a cactus?" Alex wonders. In Alex, Cheng has created an endearing and believable character, a sweet spirit, loving and forgiving, yet not unrealistically so. His curiosity and open-mindedness extend to his fellow humans too, as he reconnects with Ronnie and meets family members he didn't know he had. He considers himself "a pacifist," but he gets angry when it's time to get angry. The more he learns the truth about his family, the more he begins to wonder what a family really is. And if yours isn't working well, this novel asks, how do you make a better one? In the end, Alex is trying to figure out "the meaning of love and bravery and truth," filtering these concepts through his scientific mind. "What if the times when we feel love and act brave and tell the truth are all the times we're four-dimensional," he says, "the times we're as big and everywhere as the cosmos, the times when we remember, like REALLY remember, really KNOW, that we're made of starstuff." Alex's voice stayed with me. If extraterrestrials ever did find his Golden iPod, they would think Earthlings were wonderful. NATALIE STANDIFORD'S novels for children and teenagers include, most recently, "The Only Girl in School."

Eleven-year-old Alex Petroski is from Rockview, Colorado, U.S.A., Planet Earth. He is recording sounds on his iPod to send into space, just like astronomer Carl Sagan did on his Voyager Golden Records (Alex admires Mr. Sagan so much that he named his dog after him). As he gets ready to attend a rocket festival in Albuquerque, Alex also records an audio journal of his life. Since his mom is not functional and his dad is dead, Alex travels by train solo with his dog. When Ancestry.com alerts him to a man with a name and birth date that match his father's, Alex determines to go to Las Vegas to search for him and ends up losing canine Carl Sagan. This book's strength is its exuberant and utterly believable first-person narrator: Alex is portrayed as intelligent and naive, irritating and endearing. But it's his earnestness that attracts a motley collection of adults who help when his mom goes missing. Good for both budding astronomers and fans of road trip books.--Young, Michelle Copyright 2016 Booklist

Alex, an 11 year-old boy who loves astronomy, makes a series of recordings to send into outer space in an effort to communicate with aliens. He plans to launch them using a rocket at the Southwest High-Altitude Rocket Festival in New Mexico. Leaving his mother, who is neglectful and bedridden due to depression, behind in Colorado, he heads to the festival with his dog, Carl Sagan. His trip results in new friends, clues about his long-dead father, and a reunion with his half-sister. The book is told solely through Alex's recordings, which makes it an ideal fit for audio. De Montebello is an excellent child actor who sounds completely natural as the innocent, earnest, curious protagonist; the other cast members-Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, Graham Halstead, and Brittany Pressley-are not quite as memorable. The audiobook effectively creates the illusion of spontaneous recordings with sound effects and background noise added in. This creative and unusual audiobook adds an extra dimension to the written work and brings the story to life in a way that perfectly matches the subject. Ages 10-up. A Dial hardcover. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

If you made a recording to be heard by the aliens who found the iPod, what would you record?For 11-year-old Alex Petroski, it's easy. He records everything. He records the story of how he travels to New Mexico to a rocket festival with his dog, Carl Sagan, and his rocket. He records finding out that a man with the same name and birthday as his dead father has an address in Las Vegas. He records eating at Johnny Rockets for the first time with his new friends, who are giving him a ride to find his dead father (who might not be dead!), and losing Carl Sagan in the wilds of Las Vegas, and discovering he has a half sister. He even records his own awful accident. Cheng delivers a sweet, soulful debut novel with a brilliant, refreshing structure. His characters manage to come alive through the "transcript" of Alex's iPod recording, an odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works. Taking inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record released to space in 1977, Alex, who explains he has "light brown skin," records all the important moments of a journey that takes him from a family of two to a family of plenty. Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. (Fiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.