Alienated by Melissa Landers

TL;DR humanoid aliens that try to make a peace treaty with the humans. Humans, of course, ruin everything about it. 

(finished 4/23/15)

As my friend put it recently at lunch, "It's like the Lux series, but they don't completely hate each other." That's gonna be the theme of this review, I think. I bought Alienated because I found it in paperback when I went to buy Fairest. I've been wanting to read Alienated for a while, so I figured it was worth $9. 

And I think it was, but I definitely don't think buying it in hardcover would've been worth it, if that makes sense. Alienated felt kind of "typical" for me. I read the book over a period of about four months, so I'm sorry if some of the stuff I talk about is kind of distorted or wrong. I know I've probably forgotten some stuff by now. 

My biggest complaint about Alienated: they totally white-washed Aelyx on the cover. His skin tone is described as "russet" -- and I actually had to google that to make sure it was what I thought it was. I'll even include the first color that pops up in Google so you don't have to do it: 

This is nowhere near the skin tone of the boy on the cover. 

Against the white-washing argument, I can maybe see the point that the guy may be Cara's brother, since he is living with the L'eihr and Cara seems to miss him (as much as you can with such an immature adult like Troy), but I don't think that's enough for him to be on the cover. When I picked the book up, I assumed the guy on the cover was Aelyx. 

Anyway! I have to say that I did appreciate Cara and Aelyx's relationship a lot more than I did Daemon and Katy's. It still felt a little insta-romance-y, but not nearly as much as other books I've read. Their relationship did seem to be fairly stable, too, excluding what Aelyx withheld related to the plot. He does come clean about the lying and seems to learn from the whole thing, so I have to give him that. I feel like their relationship moved way too fast for Cara to be willing to give up everything on Earth to continue living with him, though. They'd known each other for less than a school year. Like, slow down, maybe. 

I don't really feel like I can comment much on the plot. I liked the concept of people being openly against the L'eihr, but a lot of the stuff regarding Cara felt like Murphy's Law. There wasn't really just "kinda bad" stuff. It was all "really bad". 

I liked that Cara was motivated and willing to speak her mind, and I felt like the emotions she had were realistic. (There was a @typicalYAheroine tweet that I was gonna link to about being redheaded, but I can't find it. I feel like Cara played a little bit into the "fiery red-headed main character" trope, but I don't think it was all that bad, and I can't really find enough proof to talk about it. So I'll just mention it in passing.) I was kind of surprised at how Aelyx seemed to fall in love with Cara pretty easily, despite coming off as very cold and inhuman at first and having very little of the concept of "love" to base it off of. He seemed to genuinely care about her, though, and didn't really pull any @broodingYAhero moves, so I've gotta give him credit for that. 

Gigi liked Alienated enough that she went ahead and bought Invaded to read, so I'm gonna give that a chance. I'm pretty intrigued to see what will happen to Cara, even though I'm a little nervous about the hints of an upcoming 'love triangle' at the end of Alienated. (Not that it's really a triangle, since it's really just an "on my way to steal your girl" kind of thing, but of course you can't have a YA book without two love interests.) 

TL;DR it's not super memorable but it's not super dark and depressing and I'm gonna keep my copy of the book, so that means something. I'd consider it a pretty fluffy read.