This book had an interesting concept - Aliens make contact with humans and land on Earth and after some information exchange and broadly friendly relations, they depart - but before they do, they take 17 visitors to their space ship and do something to their bodies to revert them to 9 year old children. The book then looks at the can of worms this opens whilst trying to untangle the mystery as to why this was done to these people.

Unfortunately the book missed the mark in so many ways. It is Science Fiction, and there is a hint in that word "fiction" that tells us that this is just a story! Thus the story concept is not a problem here, but I very much disliked what the writer did with the concept, because events led from the preposterous to the nonsensical.

For instance, when the world comes ti understand what has happened to these 17 adults, a legal judgement is passed down that because these people look like children they must now be treated like children. Thus their property ends up being confiscated, and they must be adopted by suitable responsible adults.

Fiction this may be, but we need a lot more convincing that any court would make such a nonsensical ruling. There are people lucky enough to look younger than they are. I knew someone who, at the age of 20 looked like she was 12. On vacation in Ireland she was asked why she wasn't in school and had to produce a passport to prove her age! But such a person is clearly considered an adult in law. So to would be a 43 year old who has been abducted by aliens and given a younger body, but remains mentally a 43 year old. No court would rule differently - and if they did then they would be censured for failing to provide an education to these "kids" some of whom are college professors!

And after the ruling everyone takes it meekly. There is no hint or thought of an appeal until the gay member of the group is told he can no longer be in the custody of a gay man!

So counting to 20, and swallowing one's disbelief at this very odd turn of events, we read on. The author tries to write some kind of criticism of religion in this book. I am not sure exactly what he was criticising though as I could not recognise any church group here. It appeared strongly that the writer's familiarity with religion did not extend beyond flicking through American religious TV channels, and thus when we had religious speakers speaking they did not *sound* like religious people. When they were berated on TV the scene was phony and when a Christmas day service descended into the hysterical murder of two "children" I was simply left bewildered. What was the author actually trying to say here?

The CNN commentary was also grating. I would have suggested that the author does not understand journalism either - except that the biography tells me he is a professional journalist. Maybe US journalism is just different from its British counterpart, but all the same I felt the commentary lacked something.

All in all this book was an interesting concept, very poorly done. ( )