My Teacher Glows in the Dark by Bruce Coville

Character wise, Peter works as our narrator as it he again shows how tragic he is. There's creativity in the descriptions and fun sci-fi ideas. There's only a couple bits I'd say are pure filler here and there. The pacing is good as we don't spend too long on certain things. We get a lot of world building stuff as we meet various aliens and see a lot of cool tech. I tend to not care for more lax stories when done badly but this is a good example of it. That's the main thing people could take issue with, it's mostly just exposition.īut honestly, I quite liked it. It's mostly about him learning about these aliens and all that, not much in the way of action or the big stuff from the other ones. This is basically Part 1 of the finale, and it doesn't have much of a plot. Bruce has said the last two books were meant to be 1 at first but split it up and it does show. We go back to when he first hitched the ride and what he was up to between books 1 and 2, as well as during and up to the end of book 2. With that, we flash back at this story is basically just a mid-quel for most of it. We start whee we last left off, but Susan wants to know what Peter has been doing in the few months he's been gone, as he hitched a ride out of here at the end of the first book. But here it is, 3 of 4 of the Bruce Coville Teacher Alien saga! When we last left off, Bully Duncan got smart and then Peter showed up along with Broxholm to wrap him up in a voyage to space to show Earth is worth saving. I wanted to get to it last week but got delayed. When I started reading more last year, my goal was to pare down my collection 😂

I have two plastic bags of books from sales now. I may read other books in the series, and definitely plan to read more work from this author in the future.

Some cool ideas are introduced in here as well, like addiction to devices (this was written in 91, so a bit forward thinking here). You meet sentient crystals, a machine that can synthesize anything, and a host of other cool things. I’m usually forgiving about all of that, and was in this case as well.

But if an adult reads the book, they may see most of it as cliche. Filled with the usual sci-fi tropes-weird aliens for the sake of weird aliens, emphasis on the relative insignificance of man-but as I have said before of Goodebumps, when you’re writing juvenile or young adult fiction, you have the luxury of introducing kids to these tropes before they realize they are dated.

My Teacher Glows in the Dark by Bruce Coville