Name: Exo
ISBN: 9780545933438

Fonda Lee

For a century now, Earth has been a peaceful colony of an alien race, and Donovan Reyes is a loyal member of the security forces, while his father is the Prime Liaison--but when a routine search and seizure goes bad Donovan finds himself a captive of the human revolutionary group, Sapience, terrorists who seem to prefer war to alien rule, and killing Donovan just might be the incident they are looking for.

Luke Kanies

Good ideas, thin execution

I enjoyed the core ideas in this book, and especially appreciated that the aliens were pretty different from humans (although still living in a similar atmosphere). No Star Trek/Wars simple mask on a biped here.

It was very thin on the economic and social consequences of the brutal stratification the alien race instituted. There is a rich history of this problem in humanity, but it was treated as though it had never been encountered before. District 9 is a good benchmark for this, and the book made no effort to even get close.

In the end, it was a relatively fun story that had the opportunity to study complex problems but chose merely to point them out, and possibly even imply they were not that complex after all.