Title Blue Hearts of Mars Series --- Author Nicole Grotepas Cover Art --- Publisher Createspace - 2013 First Printing Createspace - 2013 Category Young Adult Warnings None Main Characters Retta Heikkinen, Hemingway Main Elements Androids

Seventeen-year-old Retta Heikkinen is in love with a boy--a thoroughly gorgeous, captivating, and mysterious boy known as Hemingway. The situation is rather ideal: he likes her, she likes him. There's just one little problem.

He's a blue heart, an android.

Being in a relationship is its own complicated mess, but how long can a forbidden love last? Soon Retta discovers a secret that could destroy the uneasy truce between the blue hearts and humans, which makes life under the domes on Mars possible. Would exposing what she knows make things better or worse? And how can she know for certain without exposing the secret?

I downloaded this book for free somewhere so I didn't go into it with any high expectations and we moderately impressed. We find ourselves on Mars, living in domed cities, and humans are living side by side with androids, who were originally used to colonize Mars before it was habitable by humans. Now, the androids are so perfecly human looking, except for their blue hearts, that it's nearly impossible to tell them apart from everyone else, in fact some androids may not know they are androids. It is however forbidden to have a relationship with an android (though how people avoid making that mistake all the time isn't explained), even though they are the most attractive members of society.

We are introduced to Retta who has done the forbidden thing, fallen in love with an android. We follow her as she tries to find out why this is forbidden, why androids are designed to be attactive to humans, and to decide whether she cares to follow the rules of society or to follow her heart. For the most part she's a pretty strong female protagonist, reasonably smart and not entirely prone to hysterics. However...this is a YA novel so she has to spend several chapters wondering why Hemmingway dumped her (even though he told her it was for her own protection, just being around him was dangerous, that it was as much a sacrifice on his part to give her up, in fact he gave her up exactly because he loved her, if he didn't he wouldn't have cared to protect her) and I wanted to bonk some sense into her to stop her whining. Fortunately they get back together so she can stop being self-deprecating and being jealous every time she saw him talking to someone else.

The ending wrapped up a little too neatly, for all intents and purposes they find a way of taking down their over controlling government which wasn't quite believable. But it's a romance, not a thriller, and it was interesting to explore inter-whatever relationships (whether it be androids, race, religion or whatever else one society things a person should not get involved with). Humans always seem to feel the urge to find something to be "other" and to restrict themselves in their dealings.