by Paul Magrs
(Firefly Press)
Let me get this out of the way first: it's not quite as good as "Lost on Mars" was.
But given that I rated them both 4 stars on Goodreads, there's obviously not much in it.
Like the first book, it's quite episodic and doesn't feel like the plot really gets going until rather late in. The first 50% or so of this book is kind of picking up the pieces of "Lost on Mars" and reshuffling them to get to the place this book needs them to be.
Most of this part is still good reading - although I found the ambivalent way the novel treats Professor Swiftnick to be somewhat disorienting. At one point, it appears as though we're going to be expected to suddenly treat Swiftnick as a friendly character - though this is soon negated again. It's probably just bad reading on my part, but it feels to me as if Paul Magrs momentarily gets lost in recreating the feel of certain other books and places the character in a role unsuited to him for a brief time.
That quibble aside (and it's a minor one) this is a very enjoyable book from start to finish. I don't feel it has the strength of the early portions of "Lost on Mars" which had a very nice "Little House on the Martian Prairie" feel - but neither does it have the wrenching quality of that book's episodic format.
This still follows the same storybook format of a series of differentiated adventures, but somehow the whole feels somewhat more "tied together" than before. To me, "Lost on Mars" somehow only felt as though it had arrived at the real story it was telling when Lora made it to the City Inside.
That location is where we pick up in "The Martian Girl", and remain for the first half of the book. Even though it still takes a goodly while for this book to wind up at the next phase of the adventure, it is so breezy and fun to read that you'll never feel like the time spent is too long. Indeed, I could have remained in the City Inside for the entire book and never felt cheated.
But that's not what this series is doing. No, as I stated earlier, the kind of storybook, episodic format keeps us always rolling along to the next set of circumstances - and here there is a distinctly more pronounced L Frank Baum air to the whole thing than I recall from the first book. Whether this comparison is intended or the product of my own reading preferences is of no consequence; the similarity is there (for me, at least) and is something I appreciated.
It's a necessity of any sequel, but I felt slightly let down at the fact that some of the odd occurrences in "Lost on Mars" are given explanations here (or at least a hint in that direction) which dilutes the impact of them rather - but only in the way that Poirot revealing the murderer will always be vaguely less compelling than the investigation to undercover him in the first place.
Lora's world is still zany, enthralling and well-drawn, and most of the characters refuse to remain as they are, instead developing as the story goes on. Plenty of mystery is still left regarding events and people from the first book, and although I am eager to discover the truth I am happy to wait while I enjoy the desire for eventual enlightenment. There's so much still to find out, things that will no doubt alter the way we understand the world of this Mars.
And Lora herself still has room to grow, to become the woman it seems she is likely to be.
Oh - Barbra the Vending Machine finally made it into the story here. I was hoping it wouldn't take her long...
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