#14, 15, 16 - My Teacher Fried My Brains, My Teacher Glows In The Dark, My Teacher Flunked The Planet by Bruce Coville
Sequels to My Teacher Is An Alien, these books follow the adventures of the other kids involved. In Fried My Brains, we see how Duncan Dougal, school bully, has his brains fried, making him much, much smarter than he normally is. We also get and up close and personal look at his abusive family and miserable home life. Duncan winds up discovering evidence that the "alien invasion" of the previous year isn't over after all...
In the following two books, we are taken into space along with Peter Thompson, the kid who willingly went along with his alien teacher in the first book. As it turns out, the whole galaxy has its eyes on Earth, wondering in dismay what they should do about us (ie, should they blow up the planet or not) because of how much they fear us getting out into the galaxy at large while still being "uncivilized." (That is, we wage war and pollute the planet and allow people to starve to death and all those other unpleasant things we allow to happen here.) Peter and his friends, as well as a select few alien allies, must convince the Interplanetary Council to allow the Earth to continue to survive.
I know I read these all when I was about my daughters' age, but it was a little like reading them for the first time again, because I seriously didn't remember any of them. My girls loved the series though.
#17 - Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
After winning Halliday's contest and becoming the "heir" of the entire OASIS (an entire virtual world where people create avatars of themselves and can access any number of nearly infinite "worlds" to quest on, Wade Watts discovers yet another "Easter Egg" left behind. Not only that, but a prototype headset that allows a person to control their avatar in the OASIS with their mind, rather than by climbing into a haptic rig and physically moving. Wade and his friends (all equal partners in owning the OASIS, since they all worked together on the first Egg Hunt) decided to allow this new tech to be mass produced, allowing people to experience the virtual world as fully as real life - they can smell, feel, taste, etc everything around them. AND it allows users to record real life memories and experiences, upload them, and allow others to experience exactly what they did. Wade is naturally drawn to this new Egg Hunt - A quest to find the "Seven Shards of the Siren's Soul," but as soon as the first shard is retrieved (with help from new friends), a new, dangerous villain appears - one who takes the brains of every person using the new headsets hostage. Wade and his friends have a whooping 12 hours to retrieve all seven shards before they hit their headset usage limits, slip into comas, and die.
I found it to be a pale companion to the original book. The first 100 pages are bleak and depressing (a lot about how Wade screwed up his relationship with Sam, aka Art3mis and about how immature he is). Random social issues make an appearance with no consequence or reason and feel like they were thrown in just for the sake of the author patting himself on the back for being "woke." The actual shard hunting is boring in places and uneven - The shard on the planet dedicated to Prince has a gazillion things that need to be done before they can get the shard while the shard on the educational world is literally "I did all the quests here, I'll just ask the Queen nicely for the shard and have zero work to do." The villain made little to no sense and the ending felt like too much of a push to give that hot mess of a villain some logic. I was underwhelmed and disappointed with this book.
