This book could have been good. I give it an A for premise. And once you've mastered the concept, all you need is to master the execution.
Unfortunately, these people didn't.
Now, bear in mind that I can't point out any specific instance of "this is lame," and it's not like there's bad stuff in it. It's just also not very good.
They're addicted to having people go like "I'm saying this IN ALL CAPS!". The prose is a bit (and occasionally more than just a bit) choppy and kinda lame. None of the characters have any real personality (more than just "I have a crush on this guy," "I'm scared of the aliens," "I'm nice to the person who has a crush on me," and "I'm brash and talk like a stereotypical Australian.") The one main plot twist is well-conceived but not well-executed.
There is one silver lining to this, though. It showed me that Mike Maihack's graphic novel series Cleopatra in Space, despite having arguably an even sillier premise, is actually pretty good. (There'll be a review of that coming as soon as I can get my hands on a copy of volume 6.)
Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for fantasy (well, sci-fi) violence (lasers and energy beams and such). Also some crude humor. And scared-of-the-aliens-guy defeats a laser turret by throwing his pants at it, then wanders around in his underwear without ever going and finding new pants for... I think the rest of the book.
2 stars. As before, it's not that there was bad stuff in it, the book was just lame.
(Endnote: There are at least two other books in this series. I will not be bothering with them.)
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