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The Book: Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal
The Basics: Portrait of a teenage pregnancy. With skillful application of nonlinear narrative, Leicht and Neal take us through sixteen-year-old Elvie's story, using flashbacks--in which she deals with a vanishing baby daddy, her best friend's overly concerned pregnancy research, bullies, the lack of a mother of her own, breaking the news to her dad, figuring out what to DO with the kid, and tranferring to Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers--interspersed with the present narrative, three weeks before her due date, when two factions of warring space aliens charge in to destroy each other with ray guns and end up blasting Hanover out of its low-orbit and right into the path of total disaster.
Wait, What?: Did I mention this book is set in the year 2074, the Hanover School is a space station, both sets of aliens have nefarious designs on the unborn babies, and there are ray guns? Yeah, there's that.
New Rule: Okay, can we all agree that we gave first-person present-tense a good try as applied to action-adventure stories and that it JUST DOESN'T WORK? I don't care how awesome your story is; if it's written in that style I will deduct points. That being said ...
There Are Two Ways To Analyze This Book: If I were feeling scholarly, I could probably get one hell of a thesis out of it. It wouldn't be a stretch to analyze how some of the implications of the world--which range from vaguely creepy to downright horrifying--form a cuttingly clever satire on the current political climate in which men plot and scheme and argue and shoot each other over uteruses without really paying attention to the girls who happen to surround them. I could definitely do that.
Or I could just tell you that this book was ASTONISHINGLY FUN TO READ. It was a silly, happy-go-lucky, action-packed chunk of WHEE SCI-FI, like some glorious form of TV Tropes Mad Lib. And a lot of these tropes manage to piss me right the hell off most of the time,* but somehow they managed to come together to make the most wonderful triple-layer frosted cake with sprinkles of a story. And for all the authors' slightly forced attempt at Teen Voice Narration, Elvie is actually a pretty cool character, with solid goals (she's going to go to a top university for space engineering to get in on a Mars colonization project), an actual sense of humor, and confidence, flexibility, and competence in a crisis. She can change her mind while still making sure it's her mind. (Bonus points for when she tells someone, "It would really help the running narrative in my head if I actually knew what to call you." I'm a sucker for metahumor.)
It could work as a stand-alone book, but I'm glad it's the first in a planned series. I am seriously looking forward to more ray gun adventures in the future.
( Discussion Question WITH SPOILERS! )
*The one about how the only reason humans have civilization is because of the intellectually advanced aliens among us moving our dumb asses along, for example. That one annoys me --particularly if a defining factor of the aliens in question is that they are all male. That right there is the Unfortunate Implications trope in a nutshell.
**Fortunately, the authors seem to know that, and so does Elvie.
The Basics: Portrait of a teenage pregnancy. With skillful application of nonlinear narrative, Leicht and Neal take us through sixteen-year-old Elvie's story, using flashbacks--in which she deals with a vanishing baby daddy, her best friend's overly concerned pregnancy research, bullies, the lack of a mother of her own, breaking the news to her dad, figuring out what to DO with the kid, and tranferring to Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers--interspersed with the present narrative, three weeks before her due date, when two factions of warring space aliens charge in to destroy each other with ray guns and end up blasting Hanover out of its low-orbit and right into the path of total disaster.
Wait, What?: Did I mention this book is set in the year 2074, the Hanover School is a space station, both sets of aliens have nefarious designs on the unborn babies, and there are ray guns? Yeah, there's that.
New Rule: Okay, can we all agree that we gave first-person present-tense a good try as applied to action-adventure stories and that it JUST DOESN'T WORK? I don't care how awesome your story is; if it's written in that style I will deduct points. That being said ...
There Are Two Ways To Analyze This Book: If I were feeling scholarly, I could probably get one hell of a thesis out of it. It wouldn't be a stretch to analyze how some of the implications of the world--which range from vaguely creepy to downright horrifying--form a cuttingly clever satire on the current political climate in which men plot and scheme and argue and shoot each other over uteruses without really paying attention to the girls who happen to surround them. I could definitely do that.
Or I could just tell you that this book was ASTONISHINGLY FUN TO READ. It was a silly, happy-go-lucky, action-packed chunk of WHEE SCI-FI, like some glorious form of TV Tropes Mad Lib. And a lot of these tropes manage to piss me right the hell off most of the time,* but somehow they managed to come together to make the most wonderful triple-layer frosted cake with sprinkles of a story. And for all the authors' slightly forced attempt at Teen Voice Narration, Elvie is actually a pretty cool character, with solid goals (she's going to go to a top university for space engineering to get in on a Mars colonization project), an actual sense of humor, and confidence, flexibility, and competence in a crisis. She can change her mind while still making sure it's her mind. (Bonus points for when she tells someone, "It would really help the running narrative in my head if I actually knew what to call you." I'm a sucker for metahumor.)
It could work as a stand-alone book, but I'm glad it's the first in a planned series. I am seriously looking forward to more ray gun adventures in the future.
( Discussion Question WITH SPOILERS! )
*The one about how the only reason humans have civilization is because of the intellectually advanced aliens among us moving our dumb asses along, for example. That one annoys me --particularly if a defining factor of the aliens in question is that they are all male. That right there is the Unfortunate Implications trope in a nutshell.
**Fortunately, the authors seem to know that, and so does Elvie.
