Review: Earth Girl

Earth Girl by Janet Edwards
Earth Girl #1
Publisher: Pyr, Prometheus Books
Release Date: March 5th, 2013
Source: Library
Date Read: 6/26/14 to 7/2/14
271 Pages
Rating: ✰✰✰✰

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.

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I heard about Earth Girl from a couple of bloggers, and I saw it available at the library, so I thought to myself "Well, why not". I loved the idea about portaling off worlds from the blurb, and discrimination between the Handicapped and everyone else. Just the whole concept was so unique and intriguing, plus my love for sci-fi is out of this world (hahaha, haha.....ha).

Earth Girl came off as a novel in journal format, though it never explicitly said it was. But I just figured, since we had access to all of our main character's thoughts, Jarra. Jarra is handicapped, and she can't portal (teleport basically) to other colonized worlds because every time she does, she ends up...um, I think fried, or just pretty much dead. In other words, her immune system can't handle what's on the other worlds. So she's stuck on Earth, until they come up with a "cure". There are many others like her, which make up most of Earth's inhabitants at this point. They are discriminated against because they're stuck there, and are constantly referred to "apes".

Jarra, being sick of this, comes up with a plan. Instead of enrolling in an Earth University for a Foundation History course, she enrolls in an Asgard University (another planet's university). Now you must be thinking, "What, but she can't go off planet???" and yes you're right. But all pre-history courses take place on Earth, because this is where pre-history actually took place. In doing this, Jarra can prove to all the others that they were taking a course with an ape, and then laugh at their faces! But to do this, she needs a fake identity.

And here we're introduced to Jarra the Military girl!

This amuses me way too much

The world-building is what really pulled this novel together. The author really put in a lot of detail, especially with the people coming in from different planets. Even though we never technically visit these planets, I could see the different characteristics of each world based on the side characters in the book. The only downside to this is that there is new info on every page, along with the whole lectures and classes on dig sites and history. Yes, the dig sites that the class goes on is another huge topic of the book. Jarra and her team pretty much spends their time "tagging" rocks to be lifted and carried away, in order to uncover the secrets of New York Main, otherwise known as New York City. The terminology of all of this is somewhat dense (especially with that small font, ugh). Some of it may have went over my head. It also kind of reminded me of the battle systems in Ender's Game, combined with Jenga!

Another note, there is some funny made up slang terms used as well. Like "That's totally zan!", or "nuke it", or "I was completely grazzed". When I first saw this, I was literally laughing out loud, because it just sounded too cheesy.

I just, I just can't with this. It took me awhile to get used to.

Character-wise, I did like Jarra. And also her romantic partner Fian, who I didn't have a strong connection with. Fortunately, it was not insta-love, but more of a forbidden love for Jarra, because she's Handicapped and discriminated, and also lying about it to everyone in her class. Throughout the beginning of the novel, she knows this, and tries to keep her distance from his advances. But then, her lies and reality start to mess with her head, and she starts believing that she really is a Military kid. Honestly, this even started to confuse me as well, because she acted like she could portal off-world, and she acted like she had parents, etc.

Earth Girl is definitely a great sci-fi YA novel, especially for those that don't mind the constant flow of information throughout the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it mainly focused on the history and its terminology. Looking forward to the next two books in the series. I hope I'm not disappointed! (Though the next one is about aliens, I wonder how the author will pull that off.)