Jamie Russell

Fifteen-year-old girl gamer Casey Henderson is obsessed with smash-hit game SkyWake – and she's good at it, too. Little does she realize it's actually an alien training tool created by an evil extra-terrestrial race. When the aliens swoop down on a national gaming tournament, Casey and her teammates discover they're abducting the best gamers to fight in a distant alien war across the galaxy. And they've got her brother. Casey's gaming skills are her best hope of stopping the aliens – but first she and her online teammates must learn to work together in real life.… (mer)

Representation: Side Asian and Black characters, a character with a physical disability
Trigger warnings: Abduction of a brother, death of a father, explosions, fire

7/10, this was an interesting sci-fi book and after I read Prodigy by Marie Lu maybe this would be good as well--it was--but not as good as Prodigy just as I had thought due to the few flaws I saw in this but the positives outweighed them, where do I begin. It begins with the main character Casey Henderson and her brother Pete; the special thing is that she's really into this game called SkyWake which is a team shooter so she goes to a mall to participate in a tournament. For some reason her brother Pete gets chosen into the team called the Ghost Reapers and they play against another team whose name I forgot, Pete made the team lose since he made some mistakes then Casey had to step in and the Ghost Reapers were disqualified which was an understandable result. Out of nowhere some aliens called Red Eyes which were just like the ones in SkyWake arrive and Casey and her team are the only ones who can stop them. Is this another one of those "chosen one" stories where only a select few people will save the world from destruction, I don't know but it's not that original and it feels like War of the Worlds but with video games. Anyways they try and fight off the aliens, then they go to the dropship which coincidentally is a map in SkyWake so they know what's going on and in the end, they arrive on an alien planet which is another SkyWake map ending the book in a cliffhanger.… (mer)