This might be a wildly inaccurate review since this isn't exactly a freshly read book. Read it about 36 years ago when I was 8 - it was my first Big People book, having had my fill of Roald Dahl and Judy Blume I felt it was time to step up my literary undertakings. So I'll try to write something here reflecting how I felt reading it in third grade.

The Andromeda Strain is the greatest book ever!!! The movie was on TV a couple of times this year, but always at like 9 o'clock and mom won't let me stay up to see it. But dad let me get the book at K-Mart which was nice.

It's a super cool story about a satellite that crashes on earth and it's got space viruses on it. The viruses kill everybody in a small town by making their blood coagulate. That was wicked crazy but kind of a cool idea for killing people in a book. Not everybody died though because a baby and am old man survived. They were immune to the space germs and they get taken to a huge underground lab with the scientists and the satellite to figure out a way to stop the viruses.

The underground lab they went to was super awesome, they had to go through lots of germ protocol stuff like getting their epidermis ashed off by ultraviolet lights. Michael Crichton did not write about if that stings or not.

So they figure out how to make people immune to the virus by using the baby but all of a sudden the virus gets loose and everybody gets really scared. The lab has a nuclear bomb inside it to blow up in case stuff like virus getting out happens. So one of the scientists has to stop it because radiation from nuclear explosions will only help the germs go out and coagulate more blood in people. He climbs through to get to the upper part of the lab to stop the bomb from going off. He almost can't make it because the lab is designed to stop animals from escaping and he's climbing through a tube that monkeys might use to escape. And the lab's defensive programs shoot darts at his legs and he gets all heavy and almost gets knocked out. But he makes it anyway and stops the bomb and all his friends down inside feel awesome that they're not going to get blown up.

I really liked The Andromeda Strain. It is the coolest book I have ever read.

Going to read this one soon (I think you have to be in 6th grade before you're allowed to):


Jackass on a Camel