Have Space Suit—Will Travel is the last and best novel in the series of science fiction novels Heinlein wrote for a young adult audience. As with most of the other books in the series. Have Space Suit—Will Travel is a bildungsfoman, a type of story that traces the emotional and intellectual development of a young protagonist. The story's refreshing optimism, its wholesome, unsentimental advocacy of basic human values, and its unpatronizing presentation of scientific and technical material, provide entertaining and stimulating reading for young and old alike.

The literary merits of the novel are its use of first-person narrative, which accurately reflects the workings of an adolescent mind, and its plot structure.

In many ways Have Space Suit—Will Travel parallels Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in that there is an adolescent narrator, a faithful companion who initially seems...