Rebecca Bloomer

'A million questions pour into my head. What IS that up your nose? Does it hurt? What’s wrong with you? Are you dying? What happens when you sneeze? I ask the most polite of them. ‘What’s your name’?
‘Lily Ashford’.
‘Foley Russel.’ I shake her white, white hand. She feels surprisingly normal’. P. 15.

When Foley Russel is assigned to do a book report and to meet a character from that book, he hopes for someone interesting like a circus midget or a Formula One driver. He’s not anticipating a girl in a wheelchair, and he’s certainly not expecting to like her.’ [From the Book description].

You might fear a book of 80 pages featuring a girl with cystic fibrosis would be depressingly all about this severe illness but it isn’t. Instead we have 13 year old Foley’s relationship with his mother, and the way he matures on meeting Lily. He hardly knows what her illness is but hearing strangers murmer, ‘That Poor Girl’, quickly makes him furious. It’s also about Foley’s relationship with books. Foley and books don’t go well together. This hinders his attempt to do a book report based on what turns out to be a story written by Lily. He struggles gamely and gets as far as the cover on the first attempt, and the first paragraph on the second. It’s no use. What on earth does her story mean? He decides to ask Lily herself and soon he isn’t seeing an oxygen tube but a friend to hang out with.

Your reviewer is way older than the Young Adult market, let me tell you, but I smiled through this read, enoying Foley’s take on the world, and I got a big gulping moment near the end. I was surprised to also learn a few things along the way. Rebecca Bloomer slips in sidebars of information, rather like printed hyper links, and I discovered that the slope for a ramp that best suits ‘wheelies’ is one in fourteen (one metre up to each 14 along) and the origin of the expression ‘cat got your tongue’ (its gruesome) as well as ‘CF’, cystic fibrosis. Entertaining and recommended.

Rebecca Bloomer has also written Unearthly and Unearthed. Also Willow Farrington Bites Back, all from Odyssey Books. Her Mae-be Roses looks at teenage pregnancy and is read in Australian schools.‘… (mehr)

"This is Mars, noob. Science is our god and we’re masters of the universe.”

Eighteen months after Jodi Scarfield, former hacker into the ruthless Earth government’s programs, and close friend Astrid Forbes, Mars colony brianiac, battled to prevent sabotage to the vital dome, we meet them on routine work, assigned to introduce newcomers -noobs – Amos and Akira to Mars. At the same time a rare emergency call goes out from a mining rover and, unthinkably on Mars, where almost every medical problem can be handled, as Jodi ruefully knows all too well, a man dies.

"There’s some seriously weird snot landing on the old dome. What’s with that?’

What indeed? There follows a tale of political manoeuvring, rising public fears, personal rivalries, scientific discovery and dubious experiments.

‘You can’t just mutilate someone. You just can’t.’

Jodi can be described as partly bionic due to the work done on her body by the colony's best brains when she nearly died. She tends to personalise the colony’s robots, annoying Astrid by politely requesting the bots to do tasks instead of treating them as just things. But can anyone personalise, well, weird snotty stuff, whatever it is, assuming you could even communicate with .. err .. it? When Astrid has a dire accident, she with Jodi, Akira and Amos pool their thoughts to make an amazing discovery. But will it be at terrible cost? As they struggle with this most serious 'close encounter' humanity has ever faced, they realise that someone is spying on them, apparently intent on disrupting all their efforts.

Unpinning this adventure and the personal stories of Astrid and Jodi lie serious questions about what ‘human being’ even means, and what other forms life might take.

‘If this was life, then she wanted more, much more. ‘

UnEarthly follows up UnEarthed where Jodi first arrives on Mars and is plunged into intrigue.… (mehr)

'No one can predict the future, Jodi Scarfield .The universe is possessed of infinite possibility and you're exploring just one.'

But Jodi is whisked away from hacking into the Earth government security systems to another world entirely by her mother who, knowing nothing of her daughter's activities, wants to join her husband on Mars. A four months' journey follows.

"Not night black, this was space black, a deep, scary kind of darkness that came with emptiness."

As they close on their destination, Jodi reflects on certain personal matters about shuttle travel that no-one thinks to tell you about: how your inert body gets poked about and studied both outside and inside by the shuttle crew, for instance, and the extraordinary amount of body hair that can grow in four months. And then, after a near accident, they have landed. And her parent's renewal of domestic bliss is not quite going to plan.

" So here you are on a war god planet being circled by Fear and Dread.' (i.e. Mars and it's moons Phobos and Deimos.
Mars is rampant in our popular culture. Scientists and film makers can't leave the red planet alone. Explorers played by Val Kilmer and Matt Damon have been cinematically abandoned there. Billionaires are selling one way tickets for a voyage there of dubious value. And surely we have all, at least once, imagined ourselves able to live on another planet a big protective bubble, protected by every kind of engineering wonder.

' It was supposed to be a colony but could anything human really survive in world where even the fish were organised?'

But have we actually thought it through? What about how precious the water will be, how short your shower is going to be? What about how the small population of an isolated colony is bound to reinvent social conventions, transport, education, clothes? Did we forget that there is going to be ugly politics no matter where we go?

Jodi is still absorbing the features of her new life with the help of her new friend Astrid when she runs into Jules. More accurately, he keeps sneaking up behind her. We readers realise this can't be good. Jules' good looks almost turn Jodi's head. But there is something about Jules ...

I particularly liked Jodi for being realistically naive about her new home, as easily impressed by appearances as all of us, as frightened as any one would be in a desperate situation, but always able - with the minds-eye of a code hacker - to spot glitches in patterns, including of human behaviour, that give her warning signs of trouble. If only she would act on them a touch faster than she does!

A breathless adventure that is grounded (yes, grounded- there's gravity under that dome) in a plethora of fascinating insights into interplanetary life. I also loved the cover by Kerem Dogus.

Rebecca Boomer has followed up Unearthed with Unearthly which picks up with Jodi and her friend Astrid 18 months later… (mehr)

Jodi Scarfield is a computer geek and a hacker. If you disregard hacking part, she is just an ordinary girl: goes to school, hangs out with her best friend etc. But then Jodi and her mother move to colony on planet Mars where her father works, and she becomes 'little Earth girl'. The book is very good in describing problems that happen when moving to a unknown environment. New school, society rules and customs, food, religion, politics,...

The differences between two planets are many: from obvious one like two moons to weird ones like 5 minute limited daily shower. Although the book is short, very much attention is dedicated to the world building and I loved reading about Mars culture and how human society evolved there.

Unfortunately, shortage of pages can be felt at the end of the book because the culmination and ending are rushed. Actions of characters are not enough explained in last chapters and the aftermath has a couple of holes in my opinion. It's a pity because that's what lowered my rating from 5 to 4 stars.

Disclaimer: I was given a free eBook by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a honest review. This text is also posted on Amazon and my blog.… (mehr)