Echoes of Waystation
Just one this week. I’m currently working on another YA book, Dragons of Frost and Fang by Rowan Silver. It’s a bit of a tome.
Review: Val Vega: Secret Ambassador of Earth by Ben Francisco
The trope of “Aliens make first contact, but with some random person who isn’t allowed to tell anyone” has been around for a while.
Clive Simak’s Way Station from 1963 comes to mind, although Enoch Wallace is less an ambassador and more a B&B host.
This younger YA (I would also give it to a more advanced MG kid) book is in the “secret diplomacy with aliens” subgenre, and does it very well.
Val Vega, our protagonist is Puerto Rican and queer…just like the author…but the alien characters are what really shines. Francisco writes goodaliens, none of them humanoid (except the robot, and he’s faking it), and all of them interesting as people.
The plot is fairly straightforward as befits the age group. Val’s uncle, Umberto, dies, and has named her as his successor as Ambassador of Earth. Earth is a galactic protectorate, and the Ambassador has a voice, but no vote.
Umberto was also a high level mediator and was mediating a conflict on a colonized world…and now Val, only 15, has inherited that job too.
She can turn it down. But she doesn’t.
I would have loved this book when I was 15 and I like it well enough now. I do have one nit, and that is the author’s perpetuation of the myth that everyone in the Middle Ages was married off by 15 and dead by 37, his number not mine. I know he needed an explanation for why the aliens thought of Val as an adult, but he could have done better than that.
Everything else, though? Spot on. There is a small plot hole, but it didn’t bother me.
Quite enjoyable. Get it for your teenager…and a second copy for yourself.