Great ideas and evocative writing but suffers from an overdose of tropes and a love for violence.

We Are Omega is an alien-invasion story built on an almost-too-familiar template, in which Molly McManus and Wells Marsden, two Australian teenagers, find themselves fighting the supposedly-benevolent Xenocrustaceans. The book takes cues from Stargate SG-1, Tomorrow When The War Began and other young-adult science fiction novels.

The good: Molly and Wells are fantastic, fun characters. Molly is an angry goth kid who deliberately fails a test that would give her a chance to work at the Institute because she hates the Xenocrustaceans that much. She swears like a sailor, and doesn’t put up with anybody’s crap – a fun archetype that’s deconstructed when a dare for her to climb a fence goes horribly wrong. Wells is her polar opposite, an anxiety-ridden hacker with a shady past who just wants to figure out what the right thing to do is – and have the courage to go through with it. Their interactions with each other and with the side characters (Mackenzie, Remy, Jesse and others) are the most fun part of this book, especially when one or both of them are panicked or stressed.

Read the rest on Reedsy Discovery!

WE ARE OMEGA is also on Goodreads.