This is a fun read about a mother who gets kidnapped by aliens. Her kids don’t know what happened to her so they ride their bikes out in search of her only to be attacked by the same aliens who kidnapped their mom. Don’t worry! The good aliens arrive just in time to save the kids who are now accompanying them on the journey to rescue their mom. Spoiler alert- they don’t save her so you have to catch up in the next book.
Unfortunately, there are some factors that made this book annoying to read and I believe they would all be solved by re-formatting the novel into a graphic novel. The first issue is that this book claims to be a graphic novel, but it is in regular story form with some full page illustrations randomly dispersed. There are occasional blank pages through the story which I’m hoping is only a problem for the digital reader. My best guess is that the chapter ends on an odd page and the formatting team wants the clean look of starting each new chapter on an odd page so there is sometimes a blank even page between chapters. If that’s not the case it certainly needs to be fixed before publishing. Throughout the beginning there are different slow moving moments and moments of telling the reader things that could easily be shown. This I think would solve itself if the novel takes on graphic form. I don’t believe the first 40-60 pages are necessary to slowly tell the backstory. We could easily jump into the action starting in the 40-60 page range with quick moments of notes to tell backstory like, “Alice woke up in a strange place, utterly disappointed that her night was not a bad dream. Only her brother was in the room. Sigh. That must mean her mom is still missing and the police really did arrest her dad in suspicion.” We don’t need to read the whole scene when police come to the house to investigate the family, or see dad’s temper first hand. Readers are intelligent and ready with our willing suspension of disbelief, just tell us quickly what we need to know and we are there with the kids and aliens.
The content is a cool story that students will enjoy, but they might struggle to get into it. Definitely Middle School and up for the violence. Warning: there is a quick mention of homosexuality in the first chapter that is easy to miss and forget about as the story progresses. I’m hoping that the rest of the books in the series don’t bring it back up, but I’m alert that it may come up later in the series unexpectedly.
I received a free, advanced digital copy of this book from NetGalley.
Sonya was here 