In Which I Review Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal

Review by Lauren

copy sent for review, but all opinions are my own

Official Summary:
 
Elvie Nara was doing just fine in the year 2074. She had a great best friend, a dad she adored, and bright future working on the Ares Project on Mars. But then she had to get involved with sweet, gorgeous, dumb-as-a-brick Cole—and now she’s pregnant.   Getting shipped off to the Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers was not how Elvie imagined spending her junior year, but she can go with the flow. That is, until a team of hot commandos hijacks the ship—and one of them turns out to be Cole. She hasn’t seen him since she told him she’s pregnant, and now he’s bursting into her new home to tell her that her teachers are aliens and want to use her unborn baby to repopulate their species? Nice try, buddy. You could have just called.   So fine, finding a way off this ship is priority number one, but first Elvie has to figure out how Cole ended up as a commando, work together with her arch-nemesis, and figure out if she even wants to be a mother—assuming they get back to Earth in one piece.

Review: Just this past summer, I talked about my irrational fear of space. I still have it, but I wanted to at least try this story out since it sounded so fun. And it is. It’s also a bit shocking in places and I know that I’ve read a couple reviews already of this book and at least one person mentioned the horrible nature, if you will, of reading about pregnant teens having to deal with such awful circumstances and even dying in some cases. I get what they mean too, but while reading, I just tried to remember that this whole story is unrealistic in many ways. It’s also fun, though, and full of suspense and shocking turns and the nature of relationships – good and bad- and even how much you’re willing to sacrifice to do the right thing.

While the above statements might sound a bit intense and darker, it’s really not, and that’s mainly due to Elvie, our narrator. She’s snarky and hilarious and I really enjoyed being inside her head throughout. There isn’t a lot of details about being in space, so I could pretty much forget that’s where the story is placed…which is good for me. A lot of the danger came from the aliens and the idea of a space ship breaking down, which again, I could imagine as just a plane or something else. Scary, but not too freaky to read. It was an exciting read and I’m excited to see where the story goes from here.

It leaves you with a bit of a shocker. I actually knew what the last line was beforehand though because when I read a book, I like to see how many pages the book has…in doing that, though, I ruined the last line and while I didn’t understand how, I knew what, the whole time…so no peaking! It would have been more fun to be totally surprised! It’s not a huge cliffhanger, in my mind, but it’s just one of those things that makes you curious to get your hands on the sequel to find out answers. I have my own ideas, so we’ll see what it turns out to be!

One thing I found kind of fun were the title chapters, with many starting as “In Which…”. One example is “In Which Our Heroine Stops Breathing and Learns to Fly.” Curious, aren’t you?