Rating: WARTY!
I had a few problems with this. I know it's not aimed at my age, and that those for whom it was written might well not care about the things I grew concerned over, but this is my review so I get to say what's on my mind!
This is book one of a series, and though I'm not really a fan of series, except in exceptional cases(!), I did liked the premise of this one - a feisty Martian girl. Yes, we know there's no life on Mars right now, and that there never was any life like ours to the best of our ability to determine. There may have been bacterial life at some point before the planet became too dry, but I wasn't going to let that get in the way of a good story! The only question is: Is this a good story? I have to argue that it isn't for a variety of reasons.
The first problem for me was with the eponymous Martian girl! There was an accent on her name: Aoléon, but when the boy spoke the name phonetically it didn't match the accent. In Spanish, the accent aigu indicates the vowel should be stressed. In French, it indicates a missing letter 's' as in étudiant which means, student. Here it evidently meant nothing, so why include it? There's neither an 's' missing nor does Gibert stress the 'e', nor does Aoleon correct him. That's a minor problem, so I'm going to spell it without the é. Other problems were worse. For example, she's given certain traits without any reason as to why she might have them. We're told at one point that she breathes out of the two tubes on top of and located at either side of her head, yet she quite clearly has a very noticeable nose. What's the purpose of that? Clearly it's to make her look more human, which is something I found myself resenting and thinking was foolish, and it's never accounted for in the novel.
Another issue is her blue skin. That, by itself, isn't a problem if it's accounted for, but it never was - not in this volume. A major problem with sci-fi is that writers lard it up with oddball aliens without giving a shred of thought to how they could have possibly evolved that way. There are always reasons for the way living things are: their color, their shape, their size, their lack of, or possession of, certain organs. Because our blood is red, and it shows through the skin, which is translucent bordering on transparent when it's thin enough, we humans have pink skin, unless it's heavily disguised by a really good tan. We know of organisms, such as the Prasinohaema virens - green blooded skink, which have green blood because their blood is saturated with bile - something which would be fatal to other such organisms. There is also a blood condition which can make your blood look green: Sulfhemoglobinemia.
Some organisms, such as the venerable horseshoe crab, have hemocyanin rather than the hemoglobin which we have, but this doesn't make them appear blue. It makes their blood appear grey-white to pale yellow, which is odd enough. The blood turns blue, however, when exposed to air, because it becomes oxygenated. So what's Aoleon's excuse? We don't get told. We're just expected to accept that she's blue because she is.
These are picky problems, but there is a worse one: her behavior! This is the worst one because it's something young readers might pick up on, and consider cool. Aoleon is totally irresponsible. She's first discovered by the male protagonist creating crop circles. We're told she doesn't damage the corn - it still grows when it's bent over, but of course when it's bent over, it can't be harvested properly. In short, it's ruined, but this vandalism doesn't bother her at all.
Even that's minor compared with her idiotic behavior when chased by air-force jets. Instead of shooting out into space and escaping harmlessly, she deliberately leads them on a not-so-merry chase, and when she outpaces them, the air-force starts up the Aurora - a prototype super jet which can keep up with her. Again, instead of leading the chase into space where the airplane cannot follow her, she deliberately entices the pilot into a low-level chase across one country after another, causing all kinds of damage, and not giving a hoot about anyone's safety but her own. This, to me, was unacceptable behavior, especially given that she never faces any consequences for it. I thought it was a really bad example to set for kids.
This bad example came hand-in-glove with another one - this time of American arrogance and imperialism as represented by this Aurora jet pursuing Aoleon not only out of US territory, but across the world into London and Paris, and firing missiles as it went. This would, in any rational world, be considered an outrage at best, and an act of war at worst. Never was there any talk of getting permission or of working on cooperation with foreign air-forces. Correct protocol would have been a wonderful example to set, and would help kids to understand boundaries, but instead we get an example of a form of bullying - that the US can go anywhere it wants and do whatever it chooses without needing to ask or to share, and again without any consequences. To me this was unacceptable. That the US can do this was proved in Abbotabad not that long ago, but do we want to teach our children that might makes right - that sneak makes neat? I don't.
In addition to these issues, we're borrowing flying cows from the movie Twister and we're teaching bad physics (that zero point energy is a viable energy source). There's a glossary in the back of the novel which will explain these terms, which is a commendable thing to do in general, but in this case, I really didn't see a point in explaining nonsense. There's a significant difference in employing untested scientific hypotheses in science fiction to gloss over violations of the laws of physics - for example, to permit travel at superluminal speeds, but this is mindless and I can't recommend such a story for kids.
