Earth Girl (Earth Girl #1)

Publication: 5th March 2013

Publisher: Pyr

Pages: 271

Genre: Science Fiction

Age Appropriate: Young Adult

Buy It: Amazon Barnes & Noble

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. Eighteen-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 makes up a fake military background for herself and joins a class of norms who are on Earth for a year of practical history studies excavating the dangerous ruins of the old cities. She wants to see their faces when they find out they’ve been fooled into thinking an ape girl was a norm. She isn’t expecting to make friends with the enemy, to risk her life to save norms, or to fall in love.

My Thoughts.

Earth Girl is the first book in the Earth Girl trilogy by Janet Edwards.

I liked this book so much, the concept sounded so appealing being set in the future, add in the intriguing characters and great dialogue and you end up with this fabulous story.

It's 2788 and Earth is a planet only inhabited by the handicapped (or apes as civilians from other planets refer to them as), people who as babies who can't with their immune system tolerate the atmosphere anywhere but Earth and can't portal to other worlds, and so most are abandoned by their families with the belief system that it's an embarrassment to have a child with this problem.

Jarra is one of these kids, angry and bitter at the way she and all handicapped are treated she enrols herself at a school for the norms who will be spending the next year on Earth at a dig site to find artifacts and lost pieces of history that were abandoned in the haste to leave Earth.

Creating a new background for herself as the daughter of military parents, Jarra ends up being the smartest and most knowledgable student in her class, much to the amazement and chagrin of her teacher who is the only person that's knows of who she really is.

Soon Jarra starts believing her own lies and gets swept up in a romance with Fian a boy in her class - a norm from another planet.

But when a severe solar storm strikes where Jarra is staying she and her fellow students will be helping to save the lives of some of the military, who have crash-landed on Earth and have only hours to live buried under the rubble of a collapsed building.

Join Jarra as she falls in love, discovers the norms aren't as bad as she'd convinced herself they are and helps to save a whole lot of people proving that the handicapped can do just as much as and are as normal as the well - the norms.

I highly recommend this book and I look forward to the next book 'Earth Star'.

I give this 4/5 Stars.

Janet Edwards lives in England. As a child, she read everything she could get her hands on, including a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy. She studied Maths at Oxford, and went on to suffer years of writing unbearably complicated technical documents before deciding to write something that was fun for a change. She has a husband, a son, a lot of books, and an aversion to housework.

You are welcome to chat to Janet on twitter.

Website: http://janetedwards.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JanetEdwardsSF
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JanetEdwardsSF
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5415711.Janet_Edwards