Title Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything Series --- Author Raquel Vasquez Gilliland Cover Art --- Publisher Simon Pulse - 2020 First Printing Simon Pulse - 2020 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters Sia Martinez, Rose, Noah, Omar Main Elements Aliens, Conspiracies

A Mexican American teen discovers profound connections between immigration, folklore, and alien life.

It’s been three years since ICE raids and phone calls from Mexico and an ill-fated walk across the Sonoran. Three years since Sia Martinez’s mom disappeared. Sia wants to move on, but it’s hard in her tiny Arizona town where people refer to her mom’s deportation as “an unfortunate incident.”

Sia knows that her mom must be dead, but every new moon Sia drives into the desert and lights San Anthony and la Guadalupe candles to guide her mom home.

Then one night, under a million stars, Sia’s life and the world as we know it cracks wide open. Because a blue-lit spacecraft crashes in front of Sia’s car…and it’s carrying her mom, who’s very much alive.

As Sia races to save her mom from armed-quite-possibly-alien soldiers, she uncovers secrets as profound as they are dangerous.

Seems to be a common pattern these days for recent YA novels to be written in an odd choppy way, with a couple hundred chapters with some chapters no more than a long sentence and none going longer than about three pages. To be fair, this worked for me since I was reading this book for free online through the rivetedlit.com site so I would only read it in spurts here and there. The short chapters meant I could stop just about anywhere.

A girl's mother is deported by ICE and when she tries to cross back across the border she is presumed dead. But she's not dead. In fact she was abducted. Ok, since this is SF you probably thought "abducted by aliens" but...not quite. I won't give that part away.

The SF part starts only maybe half way through. The first part is a standard tale of a young girl of Mexican descent who is dealing with living in a town policed by a racist sherriff. And of course his son is in her class. Then one day a new kid shows up, Noah. She ends up trusting him, only to be betrayed, but nothing is a simple as it seems.

Especially when her mother returns to her after crash landing in a spaceship. Then things get really weird and the word "illegal alien" takes on a whole different meaning.

I found the book to be well written, though I was eager for the SF part to start already seeing that was why I was reading it in the first place. It covers a lot of topics from racism (we have a Mexican, a Haitian and someone who looks Muslim though I'm unsure if he is, he believes more in the Greys than Allah), sexual assault, homosexuality, religion, parental abuse, the loss of a loved one, and of course the complexities of maintaining an old friendship when a new love comes on the scene, all while trying to not to fail Trig. Oh, and then the Men in Black start chasing you around and your Mom has super powers, and your grandmother, though she died a few years ago, still stops by for a chat.

On the other hand, the weaving of the Mexican folklore into the tale was beautiful and came off as very relevant, as if our ancestors may have know more about the world and the skies above us than we do with all our science. In fact if the supernatural aspects were limited to Sia's Abuela it might have worked better overall.

For what its worth, the first half was the part that worked. It was full of depth and coming of age. When the SF stuff kicked in, I had to admit it was one ridiculous leap to the next. It was so jarring for the deep and serious topics from the firt half. Each would have made a good book on it's own, the difficulties of coming of age in a world with deep prejudices, and the other, an action adventure chase story with conspiracies and aliens and superpowers. But not sure they mesh all that well, and the shift from one to the other was pretty shocking. It's like watching some serious Oscar winning movie that goes all into deep topics, and then glueing Men in Black at the end. With Noah and Omar going all conspiracy theory crazy, it was almost as goofy as the MiB movies.

I don't know if there will be a sequel but the ending definitely leans in that direction without actually requiring one.