Title: Jace Power and the Battle of Mars City

Author: Randall James

Publisher: Breton Books

Genre: Middle Grade Fiction

Rating: ✨✨✨✨/5

Review:

Jace Power and the Battle of Mars City was such a fun read. So what did I like about this book? I liked the characters, and I liked the futuristic things that were happening in the year 2137, the fun adventures and the new people that Jace got to meet on the way. I also love sci-fi, soooo… I really liked reading what the author imagined.

Jace was a decent main character. He’s your average kid living in a titanium house with his parents, and his dad works for NASA but not in the cool astronaut kind of way, he gets to go to space, but in a transport ship carrying garbage that he’s supposed to dump in space. Very eco-friendly, I know. So Jace is embarrassed about his dad’s job, but then his dad goes on this crazy suicide mission to crash his garbage ship into an asteroid that’s coming for Earth. It’s like that one episode of 3Below on Netflix where they split the asteroid in half with a giant laser, except Jace’s dad dies in the process. See, that’s where I found it sort of weird? Like it all happened so fast, and I feel like the only thing that I didn’t really like about this book was the pacing.

The pacing could have been much better, Jace’s dad pretty much just got introduced, and then he does this crazy mission where he dies, and then Jace barely even got time to grieve and then he found out his dad was alive again. It wasn’t even playing with my emotions because by the time I realized “oh he’s dead” he was already found alive. It turns out that he ejected right before the crash. Other than the pacing, I also just found a few plot holes… Well, maybe not plot holes, but things happened without there actually being any good reason behind it. That being said, middle grade books mean that it is for all ages, and even if it may have a few plot holes in it, it’s a still a very fun read and you can be thoroughly entertained by it. I would recommend it.

Here’s the official synopsis from Cape Breton Books:

Jace Power is a timid thirteen-year-old embarrassed by his dad’s job. His father pilots the old Victory spacecraft to the dark side of the moon each week to dump North America’s waste. To make matters worse, some of Jace’s enemies like to tease him by calling his dad The Garbage Man.

But after his father accepts a suicide mission from NASA to save the Great Lakes by crashing his plutonium-laden ship into Titan, a deadly asteroid, everything changes. Transformed by his dad’s display of courage, Jace finally stands up to his chief antagonist, and soon after, he is blasting killer robots on the snow-covered streets of Cape Breton!

And Jace is going to need all of his new-found courage and smarts as he teams up with Miriam, a teen clone, to battle King Richard, the android ruler of fantastical Mars City.

Alrighty, and that’s all for now, everyone! See you next time 😉