About the Book
Title: When the Moon Hits Your Eye
Author: John Scalzi
Series: none
Genre: Science Fiction, Humor
Pages: 326
Edition Read: Paperback
Dates Read: August 9 – 12, 2026
Blurb: From the New York Times bestselling author of Starter Villain comes an entirely serious take on a distinctly unserious subject: what would really happen if suddenly the moon were replaced by a giant wheel of cheese.
It’s a whole new moooooon.
One day soon, suddenly and without explanation, the moon as we know it is replaced with an orb of cheese with the exact same mass. Through the length of an entire lunar cycle, from new moon to a spectacular and possibly final solar eclipse, we follow multiple characters — schoolkids and scientists, billionaires and workers, preachers and politicians — as they confront the strange new world they live in, and the absurd, impossible moon that now hangs above all their lives.
Review
I love John Scalzi. This is the fourth book of his that I’ve read and it’s just so fun. You don’t have to think too much. Just embrace the weirdness, laugh at the jokes, and go along for the ride.
This book is told in almost an epistolary format, with different characters reacting to this strange phenomenon of the moon turning into cheese. It’s not just the moon in the sky either – even moon rocks in museums and in government storage have changed. Why? We don’t know. We never really get an explanation. The problem is that cheese is not a very stable material to make a planetary body out of and it’s having issues, including spewing chunks of cheese out to earth.
Because of the way the book is written, there isn’t a main character, but rather a series of characters, most of which aren’t mentioned again with a few exceptions. Some characters are clear caricatures of people we can recognize in real life. This is a bit different than the books I usually gravitate to – I’m a very character driven person when it comes to reading and if I can’t connect with the main character(s), I usually have trouble connecting with the book as a whole. Not the case with this one. The absurd and unlikely scenarios made me keep turning those pages.
If you enjoy your sci-fi with a little humor thrown in, you should definitely check out Scalzi’s work. This isn’t my favorite of his – that is still Starter Villain (see my review here) – but it’s still a really good time.
GoodReads rating: 4 stars
Categories: Books I've Read
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