BURP! Nova The Star Eater by Lindsey Lesley

Nova can't stop eating.

She glides through the galaxy slurping up stars at the speed of light. Her favorite? Red supergiants. But she'll eat any star she sees--white dwarfs, blue giants, binaries...

... or a juicy yellow dwarf near a pretty-bluish-green planet? Nova opens wide and...

GULP!

While Nova is savoring the warm fuzzy feeling of that tasty little star, something else is going on down below on that little planet....

Astronomers in their observatories are aghast. Beach sunbathers basking in the warm sun find themselves cooling it in the dark. Owls wake up from their daily snooze, and the day birds rush to roost in the sudden dark.

The scientists are aware of the dark implications of the disappearance of Earth's sun! They send delegations to the space station.

"What did you do to our sun? We need it back...NOW!"

At first Nova is incendiary and incensed at their rudeness. But the scientists explain that the Earth cannot live without their own little yellow dwarf, just as Nova begins to regret the ingestion with a bad case of indigestion. It seems those scratchy forests and swirling oceans are giving her a bad case of heartburn.

But none of the scientists' ideas prevail, until a little girl pops up with a simple suggestion.

And with a giggle and a Burp and a big Bloooooooop, Earth gets its beloved Sun back, in Lindsay Leslie's jolly tale of a cosmic confrontation, Nova the Star Eater (Page Street Kids, 2019). Author Leslie slips a few astrophysics factoids into her story, as her Nova does what supernovae do, expand and engulf galactic bodies with bon appetit, in this forthcoming humorous science fiction story, illustrated exuberantly with elan by John Taesdo Kim, who ends with a schematic of the sun and its solar system family, showing Saturn and its rings and little Earth with a big sign...

... THANKS, NOVA!

For more solar system fantasy fun, pair this one with Stef Wade's tongue-in-cheek demoted-planet tale, A Place for Pluto (see review here).