You know this story. We have read it a hundred times: Aliens take over Earth, steal people for their own needs and eventually, humans decide to fight back. A few will die on both sides, but even more become heroes. And there is nothing wrong with that. Especially since Last Pick and Last Pick: Born to Run by Jason Walz have a few new pieces of information.
This is a science fiction and realism mixed together creation. There is the classic graphic novel format and set up with the text, panels and artwork. There is the familiar and the new to the story. Wyatt and his twin Sam are close. Sam knows how to help Wyatt with his “quirks” and all her life she has kept her promise to take care of him: when he is bullied, when he gets upset, when their parents are taken by the aliens, even when the aliens come for them when they turn 16. The new are the “small things” that are actually pretty big. The biggest is the aliens want only “useful” people. The old, young and “disabled” need not apply, so to speak. You will see all the science fiction we have read and seen on these pages. And you will how humans endure.
Book two expands on this rebelling and shows how the siblings must fight their own ways. There is a little romance, people who are physically different (a man in a wheelchair, a deaf girl), and there are some funny and scary monsters. And there is phlegm. Lots of it.
I wish this series was in a collection. I was lucky I grabbed books one and two together, but book three is not due until October. And even if you are not a fan of dystopian, science fiction, you can enjoy as this book is really about strength, ones worth and fighting not to survive but to live. Ages 10-14 (but adults can have fun as well.)