Apologies to those who like this book, but I have to rant!

The writing is amaturish; the caricature of the environmentalist parents is really small-minded; the "suspenseful" build-up about the missing pig and the mysterious garden next door is long and dull; the pig's disappearance, when solved, is a let-down, it was just a way to introduce the main character to the next-door neighbors; then we get treated to some heavy-handed didacticism about how important science is (which poor George has been kept in ignorance of by his luddite parents).

I'm only at page 25 and I'm ready to thow the book at a wall. Anyone who likes this book, I'd appreciate hearing what you like about it, and whether any of the issues that are bugging me bugged you, and if they get any better.

I would agree with everything you said, however, I still liked the book and like all of the books in the series. The reason I like them is that once you get past the push at the beginning about why science is great and environmentalists are weird, you get to a story that does a pretty good job of explaining some advanced astronomy and physics stuff in a kid friendly way. For my DD she wasn't interested in reading true textbooks or other resources about astronomy, but she had so many questions about it that these books gave her a way to get the information in a format that she enjoyed. I don't remember the rest of the stories being so bad in terms of stereotyping the parents, but it has been a few years since we read them.
I think if I were to ask DD she too would say that they weren't written really well, but she loved the basic theme and the science being woven into the story.

DS (then aged 6) devoured all 3 in a week. And then peppered his grandpa the rocket scientist with questions. They had several lovely conversations initiated by talking about stuff he read in those books.

Okay, I am somewhat of an environmentalist, and the caricature bothered me too-although truthfully, I know it's possible that some people can be that extreme. However they are usually Amish.

Anyway I tried to read it to my DS9 to try and get him interested in reading again (he seemed to have lost interest) but he just couldn't get into it.

Also I didn't see a lot of advanced astronomy info in the book that we hadn't covered in other material (although I do love the idea that they wrote this book). Still the interest wasn't there so the book went back to the library.

We did the audiobook of George and the Big Bang for our in-car "reading" and both kids really liked it AFTER the long droll blah blah blah at the beginning about the pig and parents. The science parts were really good, though, and both kids (4 and 8) got plenty out of them.