All Pineda Matlage wants is to get through the school year and maybe pull an epic prank or two with his friends Junior, Ernesto, and Patsy. But class is disrupted when a slew of American soldiers descends upon their rural Texan town of Soledad. They’ll be carrying out a training exercise and taking over everything, from Pineda’s school to the local government.
But Pineda knows why they’re really here. For days, he’s hidden the strange creature who fell from the sky in his parents’ barn. He promised her he’d find her family and help them return home. But with soldiers now on every street corner and armed checkpoints across every road, reuniting his new friend with her missing parents seems an impossible task. Especially when they realize that the army’s presence is really a cover-up for capturing his alien friends—being observed in a laboratory by the US government for reasons of their own.
Enlisting the help of his friends, a Black soldier adjusting to a newly integrated army, and townspeople tired of the military’s destructive presence, Pineda and all of Soledad will embark on an adventure none of them could have ever expected.
The story has a dual narration between Pineda and the alien, Luisa, a name Pineda gave her because he couldn’t pronounce her real name.
I liked the language barrier between Pineda and Luisa. In so many sci-fi stories, the aliens come to Earth already knowing English, and it makes no sense. Why would the aliens already know a language from a planet they’ve never been to?
Anyway, Luisa’s chapters were my favorites. While she doesn’t understand everything people are saying, she quickly learns a few words and is able to grasp others’ emotions through body language and tone of voice. As she observes the new world around her, she struggles to understand our strange ways. Like, why do some people hate others because of their skin color? She was lucky to be found by Pineda, who knows what it’s like to be seen as different.
It’s rare to find a story featuring a lesser-known historical event. The real-life military training exercise this story is based on was a disaster. Even after reading the story and the Author’s Note, I still don’t understand what this exercise was supposed to accomplish. From what I can tell, it only managed to cause major property damage and tick off the locals. I find it believable that this exercise could’ve been a cover-up for something else.
The only thing I didn’t like about this story was the overuse of the term ‘Holy baloney.’ The phrase got old fast.
Overall, this was an out-of-this-world adventure story and a perfect blend of historical fiction and science fiction.