Have Space Suit—Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was the first book I ever bought. Our elementary school library had a sale every year, and I was wild to own a book,\ and found this one and bought it for a nickel, I think. My mother gave me the nickel. The book had no covers but the title made we want to read it anyway. I was in third or fourth grade? Don’t remember exactly. I read it through twice immediately and made a new cover for it out of cardboard. Heinlein enthralled me. The whole process of winning the space suit, rebuilding it, told with such detail I felt as though I were doing the work myself. Then the abduction into space, the wormface, the young girl, the trek across the moon with almost no oxygen, the trip to Pluto, the meeting with the mother thing – invention after invention, a perfect experience. I wanted to live in that world, first, and then I wanted to live in Heinlein’s world and write. It was that book that made me want to write, to make my own worlds, and I set about it immediately. After that I ready every Heinlein book I could find – which was not many, in my small town. We had a bookmobile that came through periodically, then, at last, a tiny public library. I read science fiction, book after book, and dreamed about space and other planets and psi powers and such. All this came from Heinlein. He published in a category called juvenile fiction in those days; it would be young adult, now. There are some hints in the book of the stranger turn Heinlein would take in his later writing. The protagonist’s father had married one of his students. There’s an implication that the protagonist will grow up to marry the little girl he saves on the moon, which sexualizes the whole encounter. Hints of paternalism. There was a libertarian tint to the shape of the family, too, with the discussion of paying taxes and the comments about government on the part of the father. All elements that Heinlein would pursue in larger books.