Rating: ★★★★★
Author: Natalie Riess
Title: Space Battle Lunchtime Vol. 1: Lights, Camera, Snacktion (and truly this is about all of them being so dang fun)
ISBN: 9781620103135
Genre: Science Fiction, Young Adult/Middle Grades
Publisher: Oni Press, 2016
Page Count: 120 pages
Synopsis from Publisher: Collecting the first four issues of Natalie Riess's delectable series, SPACE BATTLE LUNCHTIME! Earth baker Peony gets the deal of a lifetime when she agrees to be a contestant on the Universe's hottest reality TV show, Space Battle Lunchtime! But that was before she knew that it shoots on location... on a spaceship... and her alien competitors don't play nice! Does Peony really have what it takes to be the best cook in the Galaxy? Tune in and find out!
If Chopped was science fiction... That's what I would call Space Battle Lunchtime. This adorable graphic novel series I stumbled across while seeking out content I could read to the students I tutor.
The premise is easy to grasp, the character dynamics aren't overly complex, and the art style is vibrant and compelling. I know a certain 8-year-old who adored this series, and she shared the volumes we read together last school year with all her friends.
This graphic novel series doesn't attempt to do anything too nuanced or complex in its storytelling, and I don't think it needed to. It delivered on exactly all fronts of a fun story in space built around a strange cooking competition - and the budding, unexpected relationship between an earthling and alien.
In fact, this relationship has a sprinkle of diversity in there that doesn't draw an overt amount of attention to the relationship's queerness. It's as if, for once, publishers aren't trying to undermine the normalizing of queer relationships. The relationship blossoms and is adorable without being about the dynamic of that relationship, or the selling point of the series.
(Something that I hate I wince at now despite its inherit goodness, because publishers so often use tokenism and commercial-wokeness to really kill the appeal.)
Technically, this series might be on the cusp between elementary and middle grades, but for the fourth graders I know who gravitated towards it, they seemed to pick it up just fine. This is a story you might have to buddy-read, given the silly onomatopoeia and alien terminology, but for confident readers, it may not be so.
I really think Space Battle Lunchtime is an endearing series. I'd be surprised if the first one doesn't hook you and a youngster right in.
While I know this isn't the most in-depth and meaningful review, I still wanted to pay tribute to the fun time I had reading this this year, and how excited my students got when I had a new one in my bag each session.
