From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was a YA novel in ebook format. Unfortunately it's the start of a trilogy. I'm not a series fan because the first volume is necessarily a prologue and I'm not a fan of prologues especially if they have a cliffhanger ending. Worse even than this, is that this novel was also a first person voice one. Again, not a fan at all. First person is the weakest voice to me. It's the most unrealistic and the most selfish - "Hey lookit me! Listen to me. I can remember whole.
This novel started out pretty well and the first person wasn't nauseating. Some authors can carry it off, and evidently this one can do it, so it started really well and drew me in. I htought maybe this woudl be one of the rare exceptions that engaged me, but once the aliens started showing up, I began to feel like I was reading a children's book rather than a YA novel. It seemed to be pitched a little low when it came to reading level.
It's about this young girl, Tina, who believes - because of what her mother has told her - that she's an alien baby disguised with human DNA - a reincarnation of an earlier alien who died saving her crew. At some point, Tina is going to be picked up by these aliens to save the day she believes, but at that same time, her life will be endangered by the enemies of those aliens.
In that regard it's a bit like Harry Potter! "Yer an alien, Harry!" LOL! So we have a special child, hidden with a parent who is not their own (or in this case only partly their own). It makes for an attractive premise if it's done well, and this one initially was. If what her mom told her is true, it should make for a weird and interesting story, but if her mother has fed her some fiction, it's a cruel thing to do. This intrigued me.
I really enjoyed the opening chapters with Tina and her best friend Rachael hanging with each other. They truly came across as being lifelong friends. They had each other's back and they were very close. As is my wont in too many YA novels, I actually began liking the sidekick more than I liked the main character. I don't know why this is, but it happens a lot! That slipped a little about 20% in, unfortunately! Before that, though, was the issue of Rachael being bullied.
I don't doubt there still is bullying in schools, but the way this author had it was that the bullying was rife, open, and completely unchecked. I found it to be a bit too much of a stretch to be expected to believe that not a single person in the entire school - not any other student, nor any teacher or auxiliary staff member even noticed it, let alone was intent upon doing anything about it. It was, as it is in most of these stories where bullying is involved, overdone. Bullying is a serious problem and it needs to be stamped out, but it cheapens the whole problem if it's made into a caricature like it is here.
I am not a fan of info dumps, flashbacks, or intensive backstory and this novel began with little to none. While on the one hand I appreciated that, for me I could have used a little more than the author offered, because in starting to read this, I had questions that were not being answered. I had to wonder how this supposedly semi-alien child was even conceived given the differences in DNA between us and the aliens.
Chimpanzees are as close to humans as DNA gets without actually being human, and it's not possible (nor remotely desirable!) to hybridize a chimpanzee with a human, so how would it work with totally alien DNA? Maybe the aliens have seriously advanced technology, so I let that slide, but that itself raised other questions down the line, and it wasn't the only issue.
The thing is that Tina has been raised from infancy apparently without any doctor at any time discovering that she was a hybrid! I mean she must have had medical exams and the required vaccinations, right? But her partly alien body didn't react? No doctor noticed anything out of the ordinary? And how did mom explain this baby suddenly arriving in her life? I assume, since it has some of her DNA, that the child would identify as hers if tested, but how did she explain its magical appearance after having shown no signs of pregnancy? And if this deceased captain was so very valuable, why not make a score of clones? Why just one?
So while I was certainly interested in the story because it was different, I confess I was a bit skeptical about it as I started in on it. Again I decided to let this slide and go with it. The problem with doing this though, is that while some issues, even quite large ones, can be forgiven for the sake of a good story, the more of these issues that build up, the harder it is to turn a blind eye to them.
That began with the book description, which was replete with the usual hyperbole. I know that this isn't usually on the author unless they self-publish, but it can cause problems for readers. At one point it said, "think Star Wars meets Doctor Who," and while I can get with the Doctor Who (despite Chris Chibnall), I can't stand Star Wars at all, so that was a negative for me. I'm not a fan of books that compare themselves to others, because I think it's unfair to the author, and it can have unintended consequences. Because of the Star Wars reference, I almost did not pick this up, but the premise intrigued me, even though I could not see for the life of me where the Doctor Who part came into it. Still can't!
For me, the base problem with this whole premise was that of reincarnating a "legendary commander." It made no sense that these aliens with advanced technology, and evidently under threat, would choose to wait a whole generation for a hybrid commander to grow from infancy and save them! Did they have no other commanders? Did the legendary commander have no deputies or sub-commanders who knew their tactics? Was the war put on hold until the commander could resume command? Worse than that, there's no logic in believing that even this person, the hybrid with the dead commander's DNA, would be anything remotely like the commander was - or anywhere near as canny, skilled, or gifted.
I mean, did the Beatles' children go on to become a world famous band? No! Did Einstein's children go on to become renowned theoretical physicists? No! Did Dwight Eisenhower's surviving son go on to become a legendary general? No! He did become a general, and probably a fine one, but no one's heard of him. Did Ted Bundy's daughter go on to become a serial killer? Hell no!
If the DNA of those children - 'pure', as it were - didn't lead them to emulate their parents, why would anyone think a hybrid child would do so? You are not your DNA in the sense of it dictating who or what you become. That's on you. And there's no way a person's memories can be transferred to another by hybridizing DNA. DNA isn't memory, so this premise was weak and frankly insulting. For me, this novel didn't make a good case for why this would work, or why anyone even thought it would. Still I was willing to let even that slide.
The first problem was with the aliens - and I mean apart from the clichés. The author seems to have decided to make them as diverse and wacky as possible with no regard to whether or not they're realistic. One of them has one eye, but the eye wraps around its head. I can't for the life of me see how an eye like that could have evolved or even work. The bad guys are of course cliché ugly, and have heads that look like skulls. It's a bit too much, so after having enjoyed the book initially, I began seriously struggling with it when the aliens arrived and the reading level seemed to dip precipitously.
The writing was a bit off at this point too. And I don't mean the use of 'itch' where 'scratch was meant. That was on Tina and people do talk like that, so no problem there. No I mean examples like, where after arriving aboard the mother-ship, Tina expresses a desire to be by herself for a while, but immediately they're taking her to an exam room (where the one-eyed alien awaits) and all thoughts of being alone are lost, and not even mentioned. It would have been nice to have Tina resent her 'me time' being purloined, or have the guy apologize for robbing her of it, but it was dropped like it had never arisen. Another oddity was that the alien spacecraft was called 'HMSS Indomitable' which is frankly ridiculous. What's with the 'HMSS' and why would aliens use a naming convention for their spacecraft that mirrors a usage on Earth for ocean-going vessels?
A really serious problem with the aliens is that they're not really alien. They seem like Americans who just look different from regular humans. It's quite glaring. They speak English and they use American colloquialisms. Now you could argue that they have some sort of universal translator, but the author doesn't specify that, or even have Tina question how they speak English, which makes her look a bit dumb, I'm sorry to report.
No, the biggest damning factor was that the patches on their uniforms have English phrases on them. How that works I do not know. At one point I read "Rachael looks at the winged-snake emblem on their left shoulder, which reads THE ROYAL FLEET on top, and WE GOT YOUR BACK on the bottom." Maybe they have a universal translator that translates speech from alien to English, but does it also translate words on shoulder patches? Does it also render colloquialisms? It was too much. Maybe this was the Doctor Who part?! I just got the feeling that the author hadn't really thought through the aliens, which seemed a bit hypocritical given the attention that was paid to appropriate interactions elsewhere.
Yes, gender-neutral pronoun, I'm looking at you! The fact is that using such pronouns has been shown to reduce mental bias favoring men. It also increases positive attitudes towards women and to the LGBTQIA community, so it's a good thing, but it stood out glaringly here, and made the aliens seem even more American. Every alien that Tina meets introduces themselves and gives their favored pronoun, but no explanation is given as to why aliens - I mean literal aliens from other planets - would have any conventions like the Americans do, let alone this particular one - which they all shared and which is relatively new here on Earth.
For example, the alien would say, "My name is Yatto the Monntha, and my pronoun is they." I respect that the author wants diversity and inclusiveness in this novel. That's all well and good, but what it feels like when it's done here is that instead of respecting it, it's being parodied. Every character introduces themselves like this (Tina doesn't respond in kind - at least not initially), and it quickly became an annoyance because this is not an alien thing, it's largely an American thing (at least so far).
Other people in other nations use it of course, but it's not the norm world-wide. Whether it should be or not is another issue, but that's not the point here. The point is that beneficial or not, not even everyone on Earth is as committed to this as many people in the US are, let alone alien races from distant planets, so it constantly reminded me that I was reading fiction written by an American author, rather than allowing me to immerse myself in this alien world. I couldn't imagine reading a trilogy of this kind of writing. I really couldn't.
I wish the author all the best in future endeavors, because there is some solid stuff here, but I can't get onboard with this particular one. I finally gave up reading at 20% because of something dumb that Rachael did, believe it or not. After Tina had been wringing her hands over Rachel leaving the craft, even though Tina knew it was best and didn't want to see her friend injured or killed, Rachael finally got to stay on the craft (as we all knew she would), but then she comes up with the idea that the aliens should recruit children from Earth to replace the original crew members who have been killed in the line of duty. Children! Because there are child geniuses. And Tina barely shrugs at this.
Believe it or not, there are adult geniuses on Earth: brilliant chemists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers and so on. There are also elite adult trained soldiers. Yet their idea is not to seek help from those mature and experienced people, but to recruit children and put their lives at risk. When we hear of child soldiers in the world, particularly in Africa, in the CAR or the DRC, we're up in arms about it, but here Tina is thinking this is a regrettable but brilliant idea of Rachael's? No. Just no!
I know this is a juvenile book and there are lots of such novels where children are put in harm's way for the sake of a good adventure, but the best written ones of those have some sort of rationale as to why it's the kids and not the adults. That didn't happen here - at least not to the point where I gave up reading. It was children all the way and no adult recruits were even considered, nor were any parental and guardian concerns as their children were contemplated being recruited! It was treated like these children were free for the plucking, more akin to: Yeah, we got brilliant kids, let's press-gang 'em!
I know this is 'only fiction' but I can't get with that kind of thoughtless writing. For all the political correctness shown elsewhere in the novel this seemed like a huge backward step, and I can't commend it as a worthy read. There were too many holes and too many things a reader has to let slide. It could have been a lot better and I was truly sorry it wasn't.
