Aoléon: The Martian Girl
(Part 5: The Great Pyramid of Cydonia)

This book counts for the following Reading Challenges:

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS BOOK

After reading and reviewing the first book in this series,  then part 2, part 3, and part 4, here is finally the last part: The Great Pyramid of Cydonia.  Time for Aoléon, the girl from Mars, and Gilbert, her friend from Earth, helped by other friends, to rescue her parents and protect Planet Earth.

To tell the truth, I’m glad this is the end of the series. After lots of hardships, Aoléon , Gilbert, and company, approach the great Pyramid of Cydonia, to rescue her parents, “cryogenically frozen in statis” and “scheduled to termination.”. This is no big spoiler that of course they will manage to arrive and time. With her parents, they will free hundreds of innocents, as well as milk-cows from Earth, and then work at preventing the invasion of Planet Earth. Only French novels end badly, lol. But an American book for middle-graders has to end well.

The interesting element is not if but how they will do it, and what they will discover about the ultimate powers at stake. As for the if, they will have to go through LOTS of difficult and long battles. It really bothers me that to make a book popular these days, you seem to need to insert interminable and violent conflicts. These long scenes were really dragging for me. I guess I’m too old to enjoy these. And really with so much violence in our current world, this is not what I’m looking for in fiction.

Another thing that bothered me was the use of religious vocabulary and names in this last volume. An Operation launched from Earth to destroy the Martian mothership is called “Operation Hail Mary.” This was totally unnecessary and bad taste humor according to me. And anyway most kids these days have no religious education, so would they even understand?
There are a few passages on God, introducing a totally skewed image of God. I recognize this is unfortunately a common image spread but our common culture and even some modern churches. Again, I don’t need this in scifi books.
I guess there might have been a connection with the Greek language used by lots of Martians, but la raison d’être of their speaking Greek in the first place has never been explained anywhere in the series. Plus, how many Middle-Graders, or American readers in general, can read the Greek alphabet? Some words were indeed given in the Greek alphabet, not transliterated. I really didn’t have much fun at all reading this last volume.

To be honest, if this has just been all in one book, I would probably have given up after the first part, which was indeed extremely funny, fresh, and more creative. I kept hoping that in these last parts things were going to be better again. The end of the story gives us to think that there will be more adventures for Aoléon and Gilbert, But I’ll now turn my attention to other horizons. If violent games and adventure stories are your type of entertainment, I guess this series will be fun for you.

VERDICT: Easy quick science-fiction, with young heroes facing many violent forces and enemies,to rescue their loved ones and to try to prevent a devastating invasion of Planet Earth.

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