Alienated (Alienated, #1)

by Melissa Landers

[Heather]

It has been two years since the L’eihrs first made contact with Earth. Now there is going to be a student exchange program and Cara Sweeney has been chosen to host the United States’ alien.

In spite of the L’eihrs offering technological advances, like a cure for cancers, many people on Earth don’t trust them. Protests are springing up near the host homes of the three L’eihrs now living in the U.S, China, and France. Cara is being shunned and threatened daily for being assigned to host Aelyx. What no one realizes is that the L’eihrs aren’t happy about being here either and they’ve decided to do something about it.

I liked this book. I was a quick read. I just picked it up from the library yesterday. It doesn’t exactly fit in with my Travel the World in Books read-a-long theme for this week unless we expand that to travel way out of the world.

Cara and Aelyx need to learn to rely on each other as they are isolated and threatened. Humans find the aliens threatening because of their advanced intelligence and ability to communicate with each other telepathically, which are traits that have been selected for by generations of selective breeding. Besides, everyone knows that aliens just want to destroy the Earth with their weapons and probe humans, right?

This is the start of a series. I guess the next book looks at life on L’eihr as the alliance between humans and L’eihrs is being negotiated.

I have one problem though. Here is the description of the L’eihrs.

“All of them, men and women alike, wore their shoulder-length light brown hair tied neatly behind the neck. It blended perfectly with their russet skin, and when combined with the tan uniforms, they were a monochromatic solid wall of brown. Like walking paper bags.” -page 33

Now, look at the cover.

Who is that white boy supposed to be? They couldn’t find a model who was even a little bit brown? If that was impossible, they couldn’t photoshop? Do YA covers need to be lily white?