Lan's family leaves the Mars colony, bound for planet Choom, seeking a better life. An unexpected turn of events has the fate of every human attempting to make the move to Choom riding on Lan's family, and Lan struggling to fit in on a planet where humans are the aliens.
This book is both a fun, laugh-out-loud adventure and a reflection of a very real situation. Lan's family are immigrants who narrowly escaped Earth (which is now uninhabitable) and lived in a colony on Mars before the colony ran out of resources and also became uninhabitable. Choom has become their only hope, but the aliens fear, dislike and mistrust humans. Readers on the younger end of the target audience might not recognize this as an analogy for our times, but the message still won't be lost on them (hopefully). I liked how Lan's gender wasn't specified. I imagined Lan as a boy, but other readers might take different views. Also, I liked the fact that even though Lan's sense of humor gets Lan in trouble with Choom authorities (humor is illegal on Choom because emotion is considered dangerous), it also helps relieve tension. This book is a quick read, and worth the read.
Parental Advisory: violence, some rude humor, some language
Note: I originally published this review on NetGalley.
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