Book Review: How to Date an Alien by Magan Vernon

Author: Magan Vernon  website | twitter
Published: December 5th, 2011
Publisher: Darkside Publishing
Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction
Format: Nook Ebook (449 pages)
Source: Purchased, $2.99

Alex Bianchi hopes that interning at her dad’s classified military base will make her college application to Columbia stand out from the rest of the crowd. What she doesn’t know, but is about to find out, is that Circe Operations Center is actually an alien operation center where human and aliens live and work together on a daily basis.

At the beginning of the book Alex discovers that all sorts of different aliens live among us on Earth. There’s something of a hierarchy among the different alien races and the Caltians, the race of aliens that Ace is a part of, are sort of like the popular kids from high school. Throughout the book Alex spends increasingly less time with her fellow human interns and starts spending more time with her alien co-worker, Ace; the mysterious guy who keeps showing up to save her life.

One of the things that frustrated me throughout the book is that a lot of people kept telling Alex to stay away from Ace, amping up the forbidden quality of their romance, but their reasons were very vague and not convincing enough for me. The pacing was not something that appealed to me, either. After the excitement of the first chapter or two, the plot slows way down and continues to focus on the budding romance until the last 100 pages or so. For those who like a slow progression to their romance, this might appeal to you. While the attraction between them is clear from the beginning, they aren’t instantly confessing their undying love after a few chapters, which is always a plus in my book.

I have to say a few words about the cover. I think it is very effectively matched to the content inside of this book. Overall, I think this was a light, quirky read aimed at a younger audience and I believe the cover reflects that very well. It’s certainly one of the reasons I picked this up in the first place. This novel will appeal to fans of the YA books who like a little science fiction with their teen romance.

A note on formatting and presentation. There was something hinky going on with my eBook version here, I think. When I read it on my Nook, there was a random question mark at the end of each chapter, but when I opened it on the Nook application on my computer the question mark wasn’t there. There were also a lot of malformed sentences that would have random extra words, or several extra words, in them. This was only my own experience but I have to admit that it negatively affected my overall experience with this book and that might not be the case for everyone.