Reached chapter 18. This book is taking me forever. I thought it would pick up some more but has turned out to be kind of insufferable, and very boring. There's not a complex or dynamic character in the entire thing, except perhaps Viola. I get how the YA genre works, but the adult characters are all just a bunch of jerks or incompetent morons, except the mom to some degree. The Michel character is just designed to piss the reader off, reminds me a lot of the antagonist in DNA War. He's just a device of the author and not a fleshed out character. None of them are though. The narrator isn't much better. You'd think during the heat of the moment that she'd have a motivation beyond yearning for romantic desire, but I guess this is as complex as 17-year-old girls get. Wanting to be kissed. Couldn't be more cliche. Wanting to save her sister is really her only other goal, so the plot ends up being a simple rescue mission.
The book also seems to target a very narrow demographic, rather than "opening up" to a larger YA reader base. Men are certainly excluded from this book's audience. That's kind of interesting because David Giler is quoted as saying no matter how hard they tried to get women to see the Alien movies, it never really worked. So I'm not really sure why there's a big push here to alienate (pun intended) the already existing fan base in favor of drawing in adolescent LGBTQ females. I felt Alex White's novel made some serious strides in opening up Alien to LGBTQ identity politics while remaining satisfying to fans who were already into the franchise. This book is doing the opposite.
So far it's really not a satisfying experience for a fan either. A couple utterances of Weyland-Yutani to check the boxes. Nothing really unique about the portrayal of the Xenomorphs. Nothing tied into the mythology of the series yet. And before I get called out for not being the ideal reader of the book based on my subject position, I have to say I highly doubt the YA market is profitable because only adolescents are reading these books. It's because adults read them. And on that note, the Harry Potter books I've read (I know those are middle grade, but it's the same principle) are truly great. Very good writing. Very tense narrative storytelling. A lot of complexity in terms of character development and negotiation of plot. This isn't any of those things. Super one-dimensional and boring and I'm ready for it to be done.
TL;DR: It's a slog.
