Nine-year-old Jana Jasper is the imaginative, mute youngest child of a political family. One night she sees a unusual young boy stuck in a tree outside her bedroom who reminds her of Peter Pan. She rescues him from the tree; he rescues her pet pig, kisses her scraped knee, and somehow restores her ability to speak, before leaving.
Cavin of Far Star is accompanying his father on a research mission to Earth for the Coalition - humanity is seeded through the stars and the Coalition takes over and transplants less evolved populations if they need the planet themselves. He's been watching Jana, fascinated.
Twenty-odd years later Jana is the youngest senator in DC, convinced that Peter was an imaginary friend. She has bigger concerns now - protecting endangered fish and working out who's behind a smear campaign against her father. Her love life is exciting in the press (more so than in reality), and her beloved grandfather has asked her try to keep a low profile until the allegations of corruption have been disproved. Hunting through a supermarket for ice cream to tide her over, Jana is followed by a man who looks like a walking advertisement for the latest XBox game.
It's Cavin, come to warn her that the Coalition has earmarked Earth for takeover. He's never forgotten Jana, or her planet - to keep tabs on the Coalitions' plan for Earth he's risen rapidly in the Coalition ranks. His ship has crashed and is damaged, and there's a REEF (a Terminator-like assassin) after him. Earth's only hope for survival is if Jana can take him to someone in power, so that he can use the ship from Area 51 to broadcast a false image of a fleet of Earth battle craft.
It is to Grant's credit that I could - mostly - suspend my disbelief throughout this outlandish plot. The sub-plot, of the humanising of the REEF, was interesting, and didn't end the way I thought it would. I was distracted by a few inconsistencies - Cavin has a language translator embedded in his forearm, along with a small host of other gadgets: it has access to "every swearword in every major language... as well as most jokes, insults and colloquial phrases," allowing him to say "size matters" when they're flirting, tell Jana to "come for me" before "sliding his mouth to her very centre," causing her world to explode, and to tell a Viet Nam vet that he started out a "grunt" before becoming an officer. But he doesn't know what a hot dog is, needs the expression "fooling around" defined, confuses the term 'breaking' a large bill with "tearing," and Jana needs to explain the concept of a magician. And in the epilogue Cavin is a hero to Earth. But if the Coalition is monitoring Earth communications how is it that they don't know of the bluff? Plus, Jana has an irritating obsession with Phish Food and coral nail polish (which I think should be illegal), and the chick lit staple of shoes crops up as an important plot device.
All in all this was executed better than I expected, but I don't know that I'll be back for the next Grant book. - Alex
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