The Earth Family Smith

The Earth Family Smith is an entertaining novel about a family escaping a climate-changed Earth. It is mostly told from the point of view of Cameron Smith, the oldest child. When she and her siblings awake from space sleep, their mother and father are missing. They worry that they won’t ever see them again, yet they eventually explore the crash site where they landed. The siblings find a group of the planet’s dominant species, and they are taken to their well-established city. The kids, Cameron (oldest daughter), Barry (middle child and son), and Amilee (youngest child and daughter) meet a nice woman named Quetu. She takes them in and fosters them until they can find their parents.

Meanwhile, the kids adapt to the new planet and learn about the native community; they turn out to be mostly telepathic and/or telekinetic people. The planet, Tumuera, is also facing the start of climate change. The planet’s natural cycle is being upset and the politics, which have become corrupt, aren’t doing much about it. They stay for a while, but a series of surprising events force them to migrate to a different city. It turns out that the government dislikes the immigrant aliens, not just the humans, like the Smiths, but other species as well and wants to send them away from their planet.

Join The Earth Family Smith as they adapt to a new world and challenges, so different from Earth’s.

I really enjoyed this book. It actually talks a lot about how politics work in a community, how climate change can affect us and the environment, that, yes, it’s real and that there are things we can do to stop it from getting worse. This novel was really fun to read, although it took a bit getting used to all the alien terms spoken here and there. It was also immersive and described the planet and all of its features and inhabitants quite vividly. I would recommend this to kids and teens 12 and up.