Rating: WARTY!
This book is described as being for "ages 10+, written to a Harry Potter level of reading". Harry Potter is a standard measure now?! This book has nothing to do with Harry Potter, so why they would mention that, I don't know. To me it felt like a middle grade novel masquerading as YA. The children are described as teenagers but behave like middle-graders. There are four books in the series so far. I believe that this one is the first, but I'm not sure. The others are: Molly of Mars and the Alien Nebula, Molly of Mars and her Alien Sister, and Molly of Mars and the Alien Creatures.
Molly Lennox lives on Mars. She's been adopted by Naomi, who is on the Mars governing council. As I said, I don't know why anyone would draw parallels with Harry Potter, but if you want to, Molly struck me as being like Tonks when she was a kid - but a lot less endearing. Despite quite an extensive history together, Molly treats Naomi like dirt and vice versa. I didn't like any of the characters this novel offered, which is bad, because it's a also worst person PoV story, which is obnoxious unless done right.
Molly has an adopted sister, Pirra, an alien who looks ridiculously, impossibly human, and who is a year older, we're told, but we're not told how that year is measured - by Earth years? By Mars years which are twice as long? Or by the years as measured on Pirra's home planet? The author sets this on Mars but makes absolutely no allowances for the setting whatsoever, other than to mention that it's cold once in a wile.
Pirra used to be a "warrior" for her own people, fighting in a war against humans, but that's all in the past. Despite their best efforts, peace broke out and now, without explanation, Pirra has somehow lost her powers, whatever they were. Why? No explanation. Maybe they only arise under conditions of war. Pirra is now pretty much humanized in all respects, even to the point where she is obsessed with fashion. She also appears to be Naomi's favorite adoptee. This favoritism doesn't seem to cause any friction with Molly, however.
Molly has two other friends she hangs with. Vicky Valentine and Luke, and her only interest in life, evidently, is in "hover-boarding" at the local outdoor skate park. I guess you could draw another parallel here with Harry Potter and the bizarre obsession with broomsticks, since Molly is always wanting a newer hover board. Yes the park is outdoors. Mars has an atmosphere, but it's thin and evidently losing oxygen. It's also cold, so outdoors, people tend to wear thermal suits and carry spare oxygen. More on this atmosphere anon.
Why Naomi would invite her least-favorite, most trouble-making daughter to a function is a mystery, but Molly is there and during the event she sees - or thinks she sees - two men being kidnapped in stasis boxes and removed from the house. Later she discovers two scientists are missing and goes looking for them at the space port where she gets into trouble with the police.
I think the author missed a gorgeous educational opportunity, and in doing so screwed-up the story. Whether the bulk of ten-year-olds will notice this is a good question, but I have no doubt that a lot of them will. The biggest problem is that Martian gravity is only one third that of Earth, and this would make a noticeable difference in how people moved. To the people living there, it would be normal if they had lived there for a long time, and it would not be remarkable, but the author conveys none of this gravity difference to us. It's never mentioned or demonstrated! The story may as well take place on Earth.
He screws up badly on two occasions because of this inattention to how Mars truly is. Molly falls off some rocks early in the story and breaks her arm, but given the low gravity and the short distance she fell, there was no way in hell she would break her arm. On another occasion, Molly drops a power converter off a cliff to keep it out of a bully's hands. The power converter evidently weighed very little since Molly was able to run easily while carrying it, but when she dropped it off the cliff she got into trouble with the police because someone below could have been hurt or killed, so we're told!
The thing is though, given the information available to us here, that it more than likely would not have caused any serious injury given how light it was and how low gravity on Mars actually is, yet this issue is never even raised. This could have been a teaching opportunity - to subtly compare life on Mars with life on Earth, but it was wasted.
Another issue I had with this was that the air on Mars (and the author uses 'air' and 'oxygen' interchangeably, which I think is a mistake) is thin and oxygen low, yet they appear to allow all manner of internal combustion engines from hover boards to motorbikes to rocket ships, all of which will pollute the air and burn up oxygen. This is never addressed - this laxity never explained! That's another serious mistake and a wasted chance to educate children about pollution and wise use of resources!
There are other issues that make little sense, too. The author talks of a spaceship's afterburners when he really means rocket motors. He talks of "silver racing strip" when he really means racing stripes. He says "The Sephians had stunners when they invaded to round up the girls" which is downright weird. Why would the aliens want to round up all the Mars girls?! Are they alien pedophiles? Molly's claim to fame as a 'war hero' was that she led the girls to freedom, but she gets zero credit for that.
Molly isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. She doesn't seem to grasp that Neptune is more like four billion kilometers from Mars even when they're at their closest. She claims when she goes to the academy there, she will be a billion kilometers from Naomi. I guess she still has a lot to learn in school!
This wouldn't have been too bad of a story if there had no been so many glaring errors or mismatched assertions in the text, and if Molly hadn't been such a "super hero" type blundering into things without thinking and without calling for aid from the authorities, or from her mother who was an important figure on Mars, even though she was a jerk. This endless acting without thinking makes Molly look really stupid.
Within a few paragraphs of demonstrating to Pirra that Molly is stronger, and therefore Pirra shouldn't try to maintain her warrior ways, Molly insists that Pirra boost her up on this machine they're trying to tinker with because Pirra is strong! She's either strong or she's not. In this same section, the author has Pirra sprinting shortly after her leg has been injured, and then later has her limping because her leg is weak from the very injury which didn't prevent her sprinting! You can't have it all ways! These were two examples in in a long line of things in this story which made no sense and which turned me off it.
On a museum trip, Pirra shows Molly skins of animals from Sephia, her home planet, but there is no rational explanation as to how these skins came to be present on Mars. Yes, the Martian ships evidently brought some animals with them, but how they would have ended up as museum specimens when those ships were destroyed is left unanswered. More problematic is this one creature which Pirra evidently killed on Sephia when she was undergoing her warrior training. How did that end up on Mars? It makes zero sense. On top of this, there are really poorly written lines, such as: “Who’re you?” I asked, rather terrified. Rather terrified? You're either terrified or you're not. If you're rather terrified, you're really just frightened.
After we hear (and witness more than once) how ineffectual ex-warrior Pirra is these days, Molly is dumb enough to think "Pirra would've fought harder than anyone I knew if someone had grabbed her. This place should be a mess if an attack happened." Again, it makes no sense except to once more highlight how dumb she is and how little thought she processes. Because of her name, Pirra kept reminding me of Perry the Platypus from the Phineas and Ferb cartoon series, although that Perry was more effectual than this Pirra.
The story itself was engaging enough if you closed down most of your brain, but the basic plot about the Martian atmosphere owed a lot to the Arnold Schwarzeneggar movie Total Recall. Molly's stepmom's blind tyranny made zero sense. At first I thought it was to get Molly off Mars and to the academy orbiting Neptune, where I suspected the real action was, but this wasn't the case, which made the tyranny even less explicable. Even that wasn't as inexplicable as why they built an academy out at Neptune. Why it had to be an orbiting academy, when it could have been built on the ground on Mars is a complete mystery. The extreme cost of space transportation seems to have gone completely over this author's head as it does over most every sci-fi-writer's head.
One thing which really turned me off this story is that Molly quite literally always gets the blame - no matter what happens and how unlikely it is that she had anything to do with it, she's automatically blamed for anything which goes wrong when she's in the vicinity - by the police, by her mom, and by her school teachers. It's entirely unrealistic. That was the rotten root of this story: everything was black and white. There were no shades of gray and it made the story tedious in the extreme. On top of this, Molly is an obnoxious and self-centered little tyke, so there is no impulse to sympathize with her; she's not a likeable person, and makes one stupid decision after another, never learning from her mistakes. I do not like stupid protagonists, and she's quite literally the red-headed child here. This also turned me off the story. I cannot recommend this at all.
