Earth Girl

Title: Earth Girl

Author: Janet Edwards

Number of pages: 358

Extract:

It was on Wallam-Crane day that I finally decided what I was going to do for my degree course Foundation year. I’d had a mail about it from Issette that morning. It showed her jumping up and down on her bed in her sleep suit, waving a pillow, and singing: “Make your mind up, Jarra! Do it! Do it! Make up, make up, make up your mind girl!” She was singing it to the tune of the new song by Zen Arrath. Issette is totally powered on him, but I don’t think much of his legs.

Issette is my best friend. We’re both 17 and we’d been in Nursery together, and had neighbouring rooms all through Home and Next Step. She’d put in her application for the Medical Foundation course months ago. Issette is organized and reliable. I’m not. Most of my other friends had made their decisions too, except for Keon who was planning to do absolutely nothing. He’d been doing that all through school and I had to admit he was good at it.

I didn’t fancy being another Keon, so I had to decide what to do, and I had to do it fast. The deadline for applying for courses was the day after the holiday.


What’s it about?

Jarra is stuck on Earth while the rest of humanity portals around the universe. But can she prove to the norms that she's more than just an Earth Girl? 2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can't travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She's an 'ape', a 'throwback', but this is one ape girl who won't give in. Jarra invents a fake background for herself - as a normal child of Military parents - and joins a class of norms that is on Earth to excavate the ruins of the old cities. When an ancient skyscraper collapses, burying another research team, Jarra's role in their rescue puts her in the spotlight. No hiding at back of class now. To make life more complicated, she finds herself falling in love with one of her classmates - a norm from another planet. Somehow, she has to keep the deception going.

What I thought:

This book is aimed at young adults – a genre that holds some appeal for me, but I often find that the books don’t live up to expectations (maybe because, it’s fair to say, I’m not the target audience). I also have mixed feelings about sci-fi, so I approached this book with mixed feelings. Would the combination of a book aimed at young adults AND that is science fiction be a winner or would it prove to be another disappointment…

Well, as it turned out, I thought it was a good book! Not only did I think it was good, but my partner then read it and also thought it was good, and my partner then lent it to a colleague, who enjoyed it as well. So, that was a pretty sound endorsement from a somewhat small and unscientific sampling of people.

I thought the plot was good and can see why it would appeal to teenagers – there were various themes such as acceptance, challenging people’s views and acting confident even if you don’t feel it (which are actually pretty handy reminders for adults too). I thought these were well handled and that it worked well as a book. The themes came through, and it wasn’t ‘preachy’ or contrived. Jarra was a strong female lead and wasn’t just some one-dimensional or stereotypical portrayal of a girl. I found that I cared about what happened to her and the build toward a dramatic ending was well done.

I had a couple of fairly minor quibbles with the book:

For some reason I felt as though the characters were speaking with American accents. I soon got over this though – and found their English accents. Perhaps this tells you more about me than the book though?

Plus, a lot of the technology the characters used were extensions of technology with which we are already very familiar. I thought that things might have been less recognisable to 21st century readers. Given that I probably have no more insight into the future than the author and will not be alive in 2788 to know how such things actually turn out, it’s probably not worth getting into an argument about though.

This book is actually the first in a trilogy – the others being Earth Star and Earth Flight. So, if you enjoy this first book, there is more to come. Earth Girl is currently being sold for the bargain price of 99p on Kindle at the moment.

Read the first chapter here and visit the author’s website here.

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