Mothership: 04/07/19

Mothership by Martin Leicht and Isla Neal is one of those books I have to wonder what on Earth inspired me to read it since it's exactly what it sounds like from the get go — and worse. Elvie Nava has been sent to a low orbit high school for pregnant girls. Just as she's getting to her third trimester, the ship is invaded and Evie has to save herself and her classmates.

Let me begin by saying that normally a one star rating means that I didn't finish the book. Here, though, I actually did read it to the end to see if it would have any redeeming features. I didn't see any.

Mothership is a product of the vitriolic paternalism of this country, wrapped up in rape culture. The girls here are carrying the clones of their alien rapists. No one was given enough information about who she was sleeping with to make an informed decision. None of them were given the opportunity to abort their understandably unwanted pregnancies.

This is a horror but it's played for laughs. Except for the bubbly but kick ass protagonist, the girls are shallow, self absorbed idiots too dumb to realize what situation they're in. They're pregnant not because they were raped by aliens, but because they were too stupid not to. Basically it's the "they asked for it" defense of the typical privileged male rapist.

As these other girls are just there as an example of how silly pregnant girls are, most of them end up dying over the course of the book. All the meanwhile, the over all tone of the book is that this situation is funny. It's not even the morbid humor that Bobby uses to cope with the zombie apocalypse in Undead and Unfed.

And then after all is said and done, Elvie ends up staying with her rapist because he's managed to convince her that she's his one, true love. The proof that his intentions were always purse (gag) is that their child is a girl — something that should be biologically impossible among his species. That's also the hook to a second book, something I have ZERO desire to read.

One star

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