cover image The Outsider: Roswell High #1

The Outsider: Roswell High #1

Melinda D. Metz. Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $1.99 (176pp) ISBN 978-0-671-02374-4

The Roswell High series gets off to a slow start with this rambling tale introducing a trio of teen aliens and several of their human pals. Long on extraneous dialogue and short on action, the story is set in Roswell, N.M., renowned for an alleged UFO landing in 1947. Hours after a military spokesperson had proclaimed that the flying disk had crashed in the desert, a second announcement insisted that the object was only a weather balloon. But Max, his sister Isabel and their friend Michael know better: they are the orphaned survivors of the spaceship crash, who eventually hatched from incubation pods that had protected them for years. Liz, the prettiest girl at Roswell High, has long admired handsome, quiet Max from a distance. But she gets a close-up look at just how special he is when his superhuman hands heal her from a gunshot wound to the stomach in the opening scene. Liz and two classmates are soon in on the aliens' secret identity, which the mean-spirited Sheriff Valenti, a key member of an alien-hunting organization (Project Clean Slate), suspects. Will he discover the truth about their background? Given this series' wishy-washy posture between mainstream and science fiction, many readers may not stick around long enough to find out. Ages 12-up. (Sept.)