Has it ever occurred to you just how lucky Kal-El was when he landed on Earth? Not only was he immediately adopted by the Kent’s, but there was little to no fuss around his arrival. His father was even able to just stash an alien spacecraft in the barn. It helped that, by luck, he looked human, which gets around a lot of difficult questions. But what if things had been a little different?

Our Child of the Stars (2019. 483 pages) examines the possibilities in another way. Written by Stephen Cox it tells of the arrival, well crash landing, of Cory and his mother near the small town of Amber Grove.

Molly and Gene Myers are two slightly broken people. She has struggled with alcoholism and he had an extra martial affair. To add to their distress they had also lost a baby.

On the night of the crash Molly is at the hospital, working as a nurse when she is beckoned into a side room where she meets, what she initially thinks is a small child. The child turns out to have tentacles for a mouth and is purple. Her superior feels that if the government got hold of the sick child they would at best, experiment on him, at worse, dissect him.

Molly feels drawn to the strange child, quite probably because she had lost her own, but the long hours she keeps, taking care of him, builds mistrust and resentment in her husband. Unable to hold both the secret and her marriage she confesses all to Gene.

The book covers several years as Cory is brought up in relative isolation. His death is faked to throw off the government, especially a narcissistic scientist, Dr Pfeiffer, a bit of a pantomime villain in the book.

What follows is a fairly traditional tale, with the Myers having to go on the run, often finding allies, sometimes only enemies. The obligatory chase scenes are handles well, but there is little depth to the book given that the proof of alien intelligent life would have a profound effect on both the psyche and religious understanding of the majority of the planet.

The pace of the book is generally quite gentle because Cox is really writing about the level of sacrifice parents will go to in the protection of their children. This is the heart of the story, a tale about love and family, it just so happen that one of them is purple.

7

Charles Packer