The Border

April 3, the day the world ends. The boy who calls himself Ethan Gaines can’t remember who he was before the aliens, known as the Gorgons and the Cyphers, unleashed hell on earth, decimating the population and poisoning the atmosphere with their massive, terrifying weapons of war. But he knows that he’s changed, that he’s slowly becoming something both more than, and less than, human. And he knows that if humanity has any chance to survive, he’ll need to brave a treacherous journey with a newfound band of allies in order to reach the one place where he might be able to stop the war.

McGammon’s written a decent enough tale, but the story feels overused: A hero makes a dangerous journey accompanied by a rag-tag group of people who don’t all work well together, in order to do That Thing That Saves Everybody. The background of the three alien races involved is enough to support the plot, but not enough to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, and the ending, while believable, was crafted in such a way as to reduce the solution to an almost laughable convenience.