Getting the Gorgs Out: The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex

Adam Rex, the author-illustrator of the best-selling picture book Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, has recently given us a science fiction/social satire/road movie/buddy movie script of a novel which really is too funny for words.

The plot is set in 2013 and told retrospectively by eleven-year-old Gratuity (nicknamed Tip) Tucci in a prize-winning school essay on the meaning of Smekday (formerly known as Christmas). Invaded by eight-legged extraterrestrials called the Boov, who attack with antimatter cannons and mechanical bots nicknamed "Bees," (which fly up the noses of Earth's world leaders and explode where necessary) Earth capitulates. The Boov, ever magnanimous, opt to rocketpod all Americans to Florida (where, they argue, all Americans always want to go anyway.)

Gratuity's mother, Lucy Tucci, is abducted by the Boov as a language expert/translator, and spurning the rocketpod transport, Tip sets out in the family car, accompanied (serendipitously, as we learn later) by her cat Pig, to to look for her mom in Florida. Unfortunately for the driver, the interstate going south ends in a pile of rubble created by the Boov to discourage such improvisations, and Tip's car is crumpled in strategic places. Reconnoitering for foodstuffs inside a nearby MoPo convenience store, she happens upon a solitary specimen of the enemy, a fearful Boov mechanic who calls himself J.Lo.

The Boov warns that he will have to "‘shoot forth the lasers from my eyeballs!’

I fell into a row of shelves, Tip writes. That one was new to me. ... ‘You can do that?’

The Boov hesitated. His eyes quivered. After a few seconds he replied, ‘Yes.’

I squinted. ‘Well, if you shoot your eye lasers, then I’ll have no choice but to ... explode your head!’

‘You humans can not to ex —’

‘We can! We can too! We just don’t much. It’s considered rude.’

The Boov thought about this for a moment.

‘Then ... we are needing a ... truce. You are not to exploding heads, and I will to not do my devastating eye lasers.’”

It seems J.Lo is desperately in need of a truce and a vehicle in which to take it on the lam, having mistakenly re-programed a field of cell phone towers to broadcast the virtues of Earth as a conquest into space, bringing the planet to the unwanted attention of another race of really nasty extraterrestrials--the Gorg/Takers/Nimrogs. J.Lo quickly transforms the car into a hover craft, adding a stabilization fin jerry rigged from the market's Slushious (an icy fruit drink) sign, thereby giving the car its name. The story gets wilder as Tip and J.Lo arrive in Florida, aligning themselves with a group of renegade boys who call themselves the B.O.O.B (Brotherhood Organized against Oppressive Boov) at Happy Mouse Kingdom, only to learn that the Boov, who have become fond of oranges as footwear, have moved humankind to Arizona instead and are now under attack by a huge quivering spacecraft loaded with cloned Gorgs and their superior weapons.

Still looking for her mom, Tip disguises J.Lo in a hastily contrived ghost costume made from a sheet and passes him off as her weird little brother Jay Jay, and the odd couple make their perilous way to Arizona, where they find her mother allied with a sleazy power grabber named Dan who is brokering a truce with the Gorgs in his Phoenix Airport enclave. As the Gorgs threaten both the remaining Boov and the humans, Tip and J.Lo notice that the Gorg clones appear to have one weakness--they are hugely allergic to cats. With that strategic knowledge, all that is left for the dynamic duo is to capture the Gorg cloning/teleporting devices and use them to inundate the aliens with many thousands of clones of her cat Pig, and voila', Earth is restored to humankind.

How this is accomplished involves several hundred pages and approximately that many laughs in Rex's 2007 novel, The True Meaning of Smekday. Rex's comic genius is hard to describe, but his style works for anyone old enough to read it for himself. The comic dialogue between J.Lo and Tip makes this story a wonderful read aloud for all ages, and Rex also throws in touches of the graphic novel in J.Lo's manga-style narratives of Boov life and folkways interspersed through the text. Purportedly a book for children, this one has enough sly satire on twenty-first century life to keep adults chuckling along with the kids. Take it along on a vacation trip and do a round-robin read along, and the trip will be half the fun!