Mothership

The Ever-Expanding Universe, Book 1

By: Martin Leicht, Isla Neal

Narrated by: Connie Ventress

Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

Teen pregnancy is never easy - especially when extraterrestrials are involved. The first in a new trilogy.

Elvie Nara was doing just fine in the year 2074. She had a great best friend, a dad she adored, and a bright future working on the Ares Project on Mars. But then she had to get involved with sweet, gorgeous, dumb-as-a-brick Cole - and now she's pregnant.

Getting shipped off to the Hanover School for Expecting Teen Mothers was not how Elvie imagined spending her junior year, but she can go with the flow. That is, until a team of hot commandos hijacks the ship - and one of them turns out to be Cole. She hasn’t seen him since she told him she's pregnant, and now he's bursting into her new home to tell her that her teachers are aliens and want to use her unborn baby to repopulate their species? Nice try, buddy. You could have just called.

So fine, finding a way off this ship is priority number one, but first Elvie has to figure out how Cole ended up as a commando, work together with her arch-nemesis, and figure out if she even wants to be a mother - assuming they get back to Earth in one piece.

©2012 Lisa Graff and Martin Leicht (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Story is good, but the narrator... egads!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I'd recommend the text book anyone. It's quirky and fun and the voice is strong, which makes the mismatch with the narrator so baffling.

Would you be willing to try another one of Connie Ventress’s performances?

NO.
Or at least, not for a YA book. She's a woman with a mature voice speaking for a teenager, and she has a very slow, flat cadence which is at odds to the character in the book. I had to stop at chapter two and read the rest of the book in text. Connie is a good reader, but this character, this book and voice was all wrong.

Martin does not know how to write women

Elvee is derisive of every female character in the book. There was a character whose sole personality trait was to be the slutty one in the book and her only role was to have a gruesome and pointless death. All of the other female characters were portrayed as dumb or petty or as a super one dimensional troupe. It felt like the message of the book was "Only dumb bimbos get knocked up in high school".

There's also a lot to be said about how the alien races were designed and portrayed but honestly if the poor female characterization hasn't turned you off, that shouldn't be much of a problem either.

Wish my daughters were young enough for this one..

Enough world-building to spark my imagination, not so much as to leave me lost and confused. Some of the 'slang' didn't make sense, but it was a mild distraction.

Lots of different concepts touched on here; 16 and pregnant and shipped off to an off-world school...could have gone so many ugly ways, but it didn't. The violence and blood-shed is left at remove; perhaps too far removed but it wasn't there for entertainment. And the aftereffects of being subjected to violence are nicely ignored. Which isn't a bad thing, in my book. The YAs this book is aimed at don't need another book of angst and guilt, IMHO.

Options for the pregnancy are touched on without judgement; if you have strong opinions one way or the other, probably it is best for your blood pressure to pass on this book. But were my daughters younger, I would have enjoyed going out for nachos and discussions about this book. Heck, if I knew of an adult book club reading this book, I'd join in a heartbeat. It's one of those, without having it jammed down your throat.

And the ending is an ending; no cliffhangers and the reader's imagination is left to figure out what happens after the HEA, and I find myself imagining what's next.

The narrator is capable; characters are fairly well differentiated and the pacing and pronunciation is well done. My complaint, were I to issue one, is that she sounds fully adult, and the characters for the most part are 16. Quite a disconnect for me, although the story is generally enough to carry the occasional dissonance.

All in all, worth the time and the money, although I probably won't listen to it again unless I find someone to talk about it with me.