Review by Ian Keogh

There’s an early surprise in Cosmo Park when after an extended lecture about our planetary system, Kara, who’s seen on the cover, is actually transported to another planet, along with her cat Sandro and Professor Hayley Rubin. That’s the beginning of an exploratory adventure aimed at teaching a fair amount of astronomy to younger readers. Kara and Sandro just want to get home again, but doing so first means touring a museum, being shown experiments concerning the creation of planets and much more.

The result is an awkward mixture possibly pitched at too young an audience. Tom Dearie’s cartooning is efficiently wacky when needed, and also good at simplifying complex procedures, but the look of the cast, with those big Garfield eyes, indicates a book aimed at a far younger readership than intended for the explanations.

Madeleine Finlay wants to impart as much information about astronomy as she can, and comes up with methods of explaining complex procedures like the formation of a star, or the death of a sun via experimentation in miniature. However, even simplifying matters as much as she can and jazzing it up, the dry science occupies several pages at a time whenever an explanation is needed. It leaves any subplot about Kara returning home as very much secondary, floating in and out. The purpose of Cosmo Park is to supply the explanations, but unless a young child is extremely motivated to learn about the makings of the cosmos, they’re likely to be more engaged with Kara’s plight and that’s never properly addressed until the end.

That’s also when a subplot introduced very early is finally picked up again as the truth about Professor Rubin materialises. The information is solid and well explained, but not for a very young audience, and clumsily glued on to the remainder.