I was super excited last year when I saw that Newsweek had a whole edition dedicated to Doctor Who. I think I devoured it then and found myself a little perturbed that they had gotten some things wrong. I decided to sit down and write about it but that didn’t happen right away. It wasn’t until I recently re-read it and realized that most of what I had initially seen as wrong is simply matters of opinion.

Seventeen-year-old Amy Lennox and her 17 years older mother, Alexis, leave their home in Germany for Alexis’s ancestral home in Scotland for personal reasons. Alexis’s boyfriend broke up with her and Amy had an embarrassing incident in school. Once in Scotland, Amy meets her grandmother, Lady Mairead, and learns that she is one of a long line of book jumpers.

They had been told the virus had run its course when the last of the first generation crew died. Then one the second-generation crew, a sixteen-year-old girl, is found dead and all appearances point to the virus. Has it mutated? Or is something else going on?

While traveling through a particular region of space, the Doctor realizes their route will take the TARDIS through a tollport. Landing the TARDIS to pay their toll, he and Mel find what appears to be an abandoned station only to be surprised when they are congratulated as the ten billionth customers to tollport G715. Their prize is a week in Disneyland in 1959. Deciding that a vacation is in order, Mel takes the space and time traveling tour bus while the Doctor follows in the TARDIS.

This is a sweet book. Von Eekhout has very well captured what a reader might expect in the doggie personalities of his canine characters. The book is about a pack of four canine astronauts, or barkonauts as they’re called, on long-range settlement ship called the Laika, named for a barkonaut from the early space program.