Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird vs Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets, by Barnaby Taylor

At the beginning of the regenerated Doctor Who series, in the first Christopher Eccleston/Billie Piper episode, Rose, a wheelie-bin swallows Mickey. And then spits him out again….or is it him? As part of the plot, it was a hint – no, a statement – that we as viewers had entered a world of the absurd, where the rules of normal life were left behind. Within the first few pages of Falcon Boy and Bewilder Bird vs Dr Don’t Know in a Battle for all the Life of all the Planets, by Barnaby Taylor, I realized I was in another absurd world, missing the rules of normal life, where just about anything could happen.

Falcon Boy (A Fairly Hopeless Hero) is the series title – this book is the first in the series and currently the only one published. The story defies categorization. At one level, it’s a children’s…