The Fly Who Flew to Space
Featuring glow-in-the-dark details, The Fly Who Flew to Space is an imaginative picture book about a fly who travels to space by accident, learning much along the way.
In Lauren Sánchez’s whimsical picture book The Fly Who Flew to Space, an adventuresome fly is inspired to chase their dreams.
Flynn lives in West Texas with a large family, lots of friends, and a dream of becoming an astronaut. They struggle to focus in school, where they are eager for the day to end so they can sneak away to the rocket company down the road, where a rocket is kept in a barn. But when Flynn enters the rocket’s crew capsule despite knowing better than to do so, they are shut inside and whisked up into space with the crew. Though surprised at their unexpected guest, the astronauts give Flynn a tour and explain some facts about space and space travel before heading home, reuniting Flynn with their family and giving them their own small set of astronaut wings.
The book is peppered with amusing details. A walkway of dominoes and computer keys leads to the front door of Flynn’s family home, and two pins and a cocktail umbrella make for a relaxing hammock setup in Flynn’s front yard. The school scenes are inventive, too, with stamps tacked up on the classroom wall like posters and drawings of poop used in math problems. Subtle elements of Mexican culture are woven in, with a papel picado banner hanging in front of Flynn’s home and a nod to Day of the Dead calaveras.
Though the fly-sized touches in the illustrations are inventive and charming, their scale is inconsistent. A stopwatch on the wall of the classroom is just larger than the staples holding up a makeshift chalkboard, and on the rocket ship, Flynn’s size fluctuates in relation to the astronauts and the windows. The multiple art styles further contribute to a lack of cohesion. Further, there are some issues with continuity surrounding Flynn’s flight: when mission control is shown, most screens show a rocket prepared on a launchpad, with the countdown clock reading just over ten minutes to launch. The next page, however, shows the rocket stored in a barn; while there may be two rockets, Flynn refers to the rocket in the singular. Later, after the crew lands, a launchpad can be seen in the distance—with a rocket still in place.
A fly stumbles into an out-of-this-world adventure in the encouraging picture book The Fly Who Flew to Space.
Reviewed by
Danielle Ballantyne
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
