This is one of those rare books I purchased from Amazon. I read book 2, Space Hostages, first, and loved it. Then COVID struck. I waited a year and a half for my library to re-start inter-library loans, but it still hadn't by the end of 2021. The only way I was ever going to get my hands on the start to the story was to purchase it. Of course later, my library subscribed to Hoopla, which has it, but I had no way of knowing that was going to happen.
In any case, I bought it and I wasn't disappointed.
Alice Dare is plucked from the Muckling Abbott (wink, wink! Get it? Mucking About? Anyway…) School for Girls in England to become a cadet in the Exo-Defense Force. She's always known, like all kids her age, she would end up in the military, learning to destroy the barrier the Morror aliens are erecting around the Earth so it cools to their Antarctic-preferred temps. She just had no idea it would happen so … fast. At age 12, no less.
Her mom's an ace space pilot, though, so when Alice learns she's being shipped off to Mars to train, that's kinda cool, right? She quickly meets her fellow cadets in this misadventure: Carl, who jumps into the ocean for one last swim before taking off, and his little brother, Noel; and Josephine, who's brilliant but super-angsty about spending a life in the military, even if she knows it's inevitable (and note: longing for gills -- yes, gills). On Mars, they're in basic training, under the command of Colonel Dirk Cleaver, who's as clueless to bullying as he is insistent the kids train every day; and the Goldfish robot teacher.
It's boot camp, no fun. But it's not so bad -- at least until all the adults disappear. One day, they're celebrating something. The next, they're gone. It takes about four days of routine instruction before the kids notice, and when they do, initially it's paaaartaaay time. Until the adults still don't come back, and then the whole place breaks down, aka Lord of the Flies, every kid for themselves.
Josephine and Alice, and Carl and Noel and the Goldfish escape the horror that is marauding bands of unsupervised teens in a spaceship and head to Mars' bigger outpost, where they figure the adults "went." On some kind of emergency, but what could cause them to abandon the kids to themselves like that?
Along the way, they encounter another, far deadlier enemy than the Morrors -- the equivalent of space locusts -- mindless eating machines working their way through entire planets in the galaxies. They stumble upon a Morror kid, Thsaa, whose parents' ship also crash-landed on Mars, damaged by these same space-locusts. And it turns out the cooling barrier the Morrors are building around Earth? It's to shield it from these voracious pests.
Now, all the kids -- and the Goldfish -- have to do is survive the Martian landscape long enough to get this info back to the adults, so they can do something about it.
But it's never that easy, is it?
This was a great, innovative start to this sci-fi duology.
Enjoy!
I found this book over the summer a few years ago when I was looking for science fiction for middle grade readers. There's only two books in this series, and I entered on this, book 2, then bought the first, Mars Evacuees, because my library didn't have it (although it later subscribed to Hoopla, and it is available there). They're a bit older (2016-ish), so if your library doesn't have them, they'll need to be purchased.
Alice Dare and her friends, including a freezing, tentacled Morror named Thsaaa, are back on Earth and back in school. The Morrors are using Antarctica to live on and global warming isn't an issue. She wrote a book about her first adventure, but with all the peacefulness spreading around, Alice, daughter of a fighter-spacecraft pilot, is just itching for her next in-space adventure. She doesn’t have long to wait.
She's invited to the Morror planet to accept her accolades for bringing an end to the war between Earth and Morror, along with her friends, Carl, Noel and Josephine (although she hasn't heard from her in a while).
Except Alice's Dad is dead-set on her NOT going, not even leaving Earth. He gets sick right before the ship takes off, and Alice decides to go on her own, without him. Ooof. Quite a blow.
The kids -- all of them -- are reunited with the Goldfish teacher AI aboard the sentient Archangel Planetary Ship, Helen. Helen's in love with its Captain, Rasumus Trommler, although his tween daughter, Christa, is singularly unimpressed. Dr. Muldoon is doing experiments on the ship, but the kids aren't terrifically knowledgeable about that.
Tensions over Alice's book and how she portrays her friends rise just in time for Helen to be attacked, this time by another alien species, the Krakkiluk. Helen is trespassing in their territory, and they're insect-like and ruthless. To prove they're serious, they flush Carl out the space lock. It isn't long before Alice, Lena and Goldfish follow. Their only chance of survival with no oxygen tanks on their space suits is a controlled entry into the planet's atmosphere below. So they don't burn up. Can Goldfish do it? Can they?
Up on the Helen, things are not as they seem. Trommler may not have Earth's best interests at heart, starting with his plan to hand over Dr. Muldoon to the Krakkiluk. The Krakkiluk haven't been exactly honest, and on the planet, Alice and Lena and Carl start to put things together. But the air is not exactly breatheable -- it is, but it'll kill them in about a week. So they better get off planet, and fast.
I won't say how the rest of it unfolds, just know, when it was over I was bitterly disappointed there isn't another in the series. And I ran out and bought the first one, as my library STILL isn't doing ILLs (inter-library loans).
Enjoy!
