Stepsister from the Planet Weird

Ariel, the title character in Lantz's (Dear Celeste, My Life Is a Mess) flighty caper is an unwilling transplant to California from Zircalon-6, a planet where she lived ""as a ball of beautiful pink gas laced with nerve sensors, floating gently beside my friends, telepathically perceiving their thoughts, feeling them perceiving mine."" This self-portrait appears in the Zircalonian's journal, where she divulges her homesickness and laments her father's decision to live disguised as humans in a society to which he, a wide-eyed, Sesame Street-loving alien, has taken a great liking. The narrative alternates between Ariel's perspective and the first-person account of Megan, a sixth-grader whose mother falls in love with Ariel's father. The juxtaposition points up the differences between the two: Megan's believable teen-speak counterpoints Ariel's journal entries, a curious blend of robot-like speech and passages that could be attributed to the distraught heroine of a Victorian epistolary novel (""Oh, dreariness and dread! Oh muddle and misery!""). Her otherworldly status offers Ariel the chance to make amusing observations earth girls can appreciate (e.g., ""I do not understand Earth boys. For some unknown reason, they desire to speak with me, but their conversation is pathetically empty and meaningless""). Lantz pieces together a light, fast read that is playfully muddled yet anything but dreary. Ages 8-12. (Oct.)