Alienated by Melissa Landers

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

     While reading this book, Alienated will have one’s self gripping the edge or his or her seat, dying to know what will happen next. A lot has happened since the aliens made contact with Earth, and Melissa Landers does a decent job portraying that in her book. However, some parts of this book could lull one to sleep and make him or her want to throw his or her copy across the room.

     Cara Sweeney is valedictorian of her class, very intelligent, on the debate team, and also wants to become a journalist when she grows up. Because of her skills inside and outside of the classroom, she has been chosen to host the first exchange program with another planet called L’eihr. The L’eihrs have made much more progress scientifically than humans, and if humans and L’eihrs can coexist, then everybody wins.

     To start off with, Aelyx is the exchange student who lives with Cara for eight months on Earth to see if the exchange program works. He is very closed off, yet brilliant, and he is also up to no good when he arrived on Earth. To talk about what it was like to live with a L’eihr and because she wants to become a journalist, Cara made a blog called Alienated (hence the title) because she wants the world to know about L’eihrs. However, Landers does not really show how much Cara really wanted to be a journalist. Through out the whole entire book, there are about seven blog posts shown. If Cara was really into being a journalist, she would not be blogging. She would be writing articles. Also, the length of the blog posts are hardly half a page, and a person who wanted to be a serious journalist would write more than half a page. Landers made journalism seem very relevant to Cara in the beginning, but then Landers does not talk about it once after Cara stopped posting her blogs.

     Fortunately, love filled the air as Cara and Aelyx become closer and closer to each other throughout the months they lived together in close corridors. But, as a huge romanticist, I hated to find out that this book had 344 pages, and nothing major happened in their relationship until page 212! That is way too long to wait for the first big get together in a book. Regarding this, Aelyx and Cara shared several cute moments together before the first big kiss happens. When one reads these types of books and one knows that the two main characters are going to get together, it is loathsome waiting for the big scene to happen, and waiting for page 212 was torture. I could not believe how long Landers waited to put that into her book, and if she put it earlier, then this book probably would have gotten four out of five stars. I got bored very easily while reading the beginning of this book, but after Cara and Aelyx finally kissed, the book takes a new turn and action and romance finally get involved.

     As well as this, Midtown, the town Cara lives in, hates the exchange program. In fact, a patriot group called the Humans Against L’eihr Occupations or HALO, starts. Moreover, there were protests at the school, an expulsion act running through the representatives, people blaming L’eihrs for everything that was going wrong with the Earth, and all this craziness. It reminded me of the 1960’s, when African Americans were treated unfairly due to the color of their skin. It was the exact same discrimination in this book as was in the 1960s. Notably, I liked how Landers incorporated this, because discriminating people just because they are from a different place does not mean they are bad or intend to do bad things to another person or race. It is such an important issue, and having it as an issue in her book made Alienated more realistic. In reality, people get scared when things they do not know about come into their life, and the fight or flight mode kicks in their system.  It is just how humans are programed.

     Overall, this book was very good. It was very long in the beginning and needed more rising action because I got bored very easily, but then it became super interesting, and I did not want to put it down. Landers did a great job writing romance scenes and also had a way with words with writing about another planet because I could picture L’eihr in my head throughout reading.

     So, if one likes romance and science fiction, then this is a good book for him or her to read. However, if one does not like aliens, I would suggest picking something else.