The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The background is dark and split into two sections. The upper half shows a dark blue, space like sky covered in stars. The lower half shows a silhouetted city scape under a cloudy sky. Birds on the left side of the cover fly across both halves. The silhouette of a person standing on top of a building can be seen lower centre right on the cover. The author’s name “Janet Edwards” is at the top of the cover in black capitals.
The title “Earth Girl” is immediately below this in larger, white capitals.
“One choice will change her world forever” is written at the bottom of the cover in smaller white capitals. /end]

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Content Warning:

• Violence
• Grief
• Medical Trauma
• Genocide

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Summary:

Jarra is stuck on Earth while the rest of humanity portals around the universe. But can she prove to the norms that she’s more than just an Earth Girl?

2788. Only the handicapped live on Earth. While everyone else portals between worlds, 18-year-old Jarra is among the one in a thousand people born with an immune system that cannot survive on other planets. Sent to Earth at birth to save her life, she has been abandoned by her parents. She can’t travel to other worlds, but she can watch their vids, and she knows all the jokes they make. She’s an ‘ape’, a ‘throwback’, but this is one ape girl who won’t give in.

Jarra invents a fake background for herself – as a normal child of Military parents – and joins a class of norms that is on Earth to excavate the ruins of the old cities. When an ancient skyscraper collapses, burying another research team, Jarra’s role in their rescue puts her in the spotlight. No hiding at back of class now. To make life more complicated, she finds herself falling in love with one of her classmates – a norm from another planet. Somehow, she has to keep the deception going.

A freak solar storm strikes the atmosphere, and the class is ordered to portal off-world for safety – no problem for a real child of military parents, but fatal for Jarra. The storm is so bad that the crews of the orbiting solar arrays have to escape to planet below: the first landing from space in 600 years. And one is on collision course with their shelter.

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Notes:

This is the first book in the Earth Girl series.

There is an audiobook.

This book won the 2013 Bookworm Best Award for Best Fiction.

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Archivist Comments:

Anyone remember Gattaka?

I think the latest book in this series came out in 2020.

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