The Soviet version of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

But "The Adventure Seller" is not your typical Soviet children's book; it is completely devoid of moralizing and propaganda, lacks any signs of socialist daily life, but is full of merry chaos, absurd humor, surrealism, and a total disregard for the laws of nature and physics. There is only one law here: adventures must be interesting!

So, a group of comrades sets off on a journey through the galaxy—not by hitchhiking, but on their own starship built from old mechanical toys, a grand piano, wall clocks, and... "all sorts of things."

They encounter amazing meetings in open space, and the footprints of our travelers will remain on many dusty paths of distant planets. Here, witches fly on broomsticks, a knight on the spaceship "Savraska" plows the expanses of the Universe, a planet's axle gets rusty, space is bent with pliers, and everyone looks for the mysterious blyambimbombam, even though no one has any idea what it is. 

They wait out the G-force in a bathtub filled with sunflower oil (the cat Myauka, who is also a crew member, didn't want to get in the tub and got so flattened that he became as thin as a rug. And so he stayed until the very end of the adventures, the stubborn creature).

The characters even visit the past and meet their great-great-great-ancestors—this is a mind-blowingly funny chapter in which saber-toothed tigers brandish their sabers in the sun, mammoth bones are swapped with a herring skeleton, and they escape from a pit by standing on their heads because the top of the pit then essentially becomes a holey floor.

There is also, for example, a planet ruled by a vain writer—reminds one of the poets from "Hitchhiker's Guide"...

And if you suspect something is amiss, don't rush to blame the author: "The Adventure Seller" was written several years before Douglas Adams' book ;)

Yes, we almost forgot the most important thing: why did the kids go on this adventure in the first place? They set off in search of nothing less than love, imagine that! And they found it.

"The Adventure Seller" by Georgy Sadovnikov is for teenagers 10+ with a good sense of humor.