Overall ratting: 80%
France, China and America were all chosen to submit their smartest students for a chance to host an alien exchange student. Cara Sweeney is valedictorian at her high school in Midtown USA and is chosen to host America' s LEAP student(the L'eihr Exchange Ambassador Program). Cara is persuaded to take the job in exchange for a desperately needed scholarship and the opportunity of a lifetime.
Aelyx is not impressed by the human kind. They are a barbaric and inferior race and he wants nothing to do with them. He can't stand the colours, smells or tastes of Earth.
Midtown is not impressed with him either, mobs and paranoia spread quickly across the globe.
Inevitably Cara falls for Aelyx and Aelyx falls for Cara. But will he choose to protect his planet first, and potentially risk killing the entire human race, or will his love for Cara win out? Or will extremists do it all for him?
REVIEW (no spoilers, just opinions)
This is the type of book where, as a whole it's great. You had the time of your life breezing through it and looking back you're left feeling all warm and fuzzy. But when you look back and try to pick it apart and decide what you did like and what you didn't like, you sit down with your notebook full of cons but with only one pro.
Basically all the cutesy Aelyx and Cara moments gave me butterflies. Also, as a person with a phobia of bellybuttons Aelyx quickly became my dream man.
Luckily the cons are just teeny tiny things so they didn't affect my experience too much.
The secondary characters weren't properly flushed out and the author got rid of them in a haste. Their was no buildup whatsoever. Cara was a bit too stereotypical of a teen girl. Her parents were oblivious to everything. And Cara was made up to be this intelligent, take nothing from no one kind of girl, yet she let Aelyx distract her and change the subject every time she tried to get him to open up about things. L'eihrs are described as a cold emotionless people, yet Aelyx seemed to develop feelings at an alarmingly quick rate.
My review will go into more detail (beware of spoilers) in the discussion section.
DISCUSSION (lots of spoilers)
Eric's character made no sense at all. Cara couldn't make sense of who he was when he was with her, then afterwards he became one of those guys, then he is all sweet with Tori even though Tori hated him before? The author tries to explain his relationship with both girls as unexplainable. It just didn't make any sense.
Cara quickly lets important conversations drop in favour of kissing. I know, I know "Who can blame her? Aelyx is hot." But again, Cara is very passionate about debates (something she and I share), she wouldn't realistically have let him get away with hiding the truth from her so easily.
What really annoyed me was her "we love each other" speech she gave to her father. You're on the debate team yet you use Disney material to convince your parents that you aren't trying to make babies with him? "I'm practically a grown up." "It's none of your business." "But I love him!!!" I was not impressed.
But then there was the scene where Aelyx was trying to cheer her up over loosing Tori so he brought her massive amounts of chocolate. And when that didn't work he drew a picture of his house pet for her and took her to blow off some steam at the boxing center.
"Most humans expressed affection by pressing their lips together, a simple act, so why would anyone feel the need to research the process? Was there more to it? He decided to find out. Aelyx clicked the suggested links, and for the next two hours, he gave himself the kind of education they didn't provide at the Aegis."
And on that note I'm going to end this review with a quick reminder that the second book in the series came out today! It's called Invaded. I hope you all enjoyed this review and I hope that you get the chance to pick up the second book.
P.S. Ming and Eron <3
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