I'm not normally into this type of science fiction stories but found this one very enjoyable and recommend to all science fiction readers

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a copy for review.

I found the premise to be enticing. I like books set in space, and a colony on Mars sounded like something I would enjoy. Unfortunately this book didn't live up to the expectations. Our story starts in an apocalyptic future, we have over populated and destroyed the resources of Earth. It is a very high tech society, and honestly some of the tech was confusing. They can have manufactured body parts, implanted tech, there's a blip verse, and AI's everywhere. Tom is a sixteen year old who was born on Mars, where he lives with the surviving colonists. They have been stranded here with no contact for 17 years. Our other main character is Sophia. She is the daughter of the scientist who helped put them on Mars.
Here's where we really run into issues. The characters felt really flat and I don't know, stiff. The dialogue felt so forced and unnatural. At one point Sophia gets grabbed while in the middle of a mob. Instead of freaking out about this like a normal person her immediate thought is along the lines of, "I wonder if he's making a memory too and thinking of me." This was literally a 5 second interaction. The dialogue was either very unnatural or incredibly overdramatic, which just made reading this not very fun.

This book seemed right up my alley, but unfortunately fell short of my expectation. Mars colony is all that Tom has known, but the desire to return to Earth is strong. With little character development and little descriptive prose, I almost didn't finish this book in fear of giving it a poor review. Instead, it seems like it is a book that tried, but never got there. Only my opinion.

"Martian Blood" is a debut novel by John Pahl. It is the first book in a series - "The "Nocilucents" series However I dont really know where the series title comes from. I liked the cover.
The plot is about a small colony from earth which is trapped on Mars. Their rescue ship exploded while taking off to rescue them 15 years earlier. Tom was born on Mars and would do anything to get to Earth. And this story tells us how he got back to Earth.

"Martian Blood" is aimed at the YA market and as such it held my attention. It is well written, the characters are likeable and real. It includes a teenage love story, of sorts. However it does lack dept - but as a YA read it is perfectly adequate. I would love to have one of those "MakeIt machines" - it would be very useful.

I the excitement at the end I got a bit lost. It might not be Anthony Horowitz but it was OK. I enjoyed it.

I gave it 4 stars.

Thank you to netgalley, the publisher and the author for sending me this ARC.

Book Review for “Martian Blood” by John Pahl. Thank you to NetGalley for sending me an ARC!

Synopsis from GR: When the Prometheus exploded, everything changed. The ship was meant to retrieve a team of colonists from Mars. Instead, it ushered in a decade of chaos and left the colonists stranded. For all sixteen years of his life, Tom has known nothing but the red dirt of Mars and the cramped research base he calls home. That and stories of Earth, a silent blue dot in his sky. As the base's resources dwindle and tensions between the surviving colonists run high, Tom makes a promise to himself: he'll get to Earth or die trying. Sophia Kasparov, daughter of the AI expert behind the Prometheus, triggers a global media frenzy when she accidentally reveals her father's plans to launch a rescue mission to Mars. Support for the controversial mission is hard to come by, especially when it's opposed by the ruthless anti-spaceflight eco-fundamentalist Cita Stone. As Sophia struggles to navigate the political chaos surrounding the mission, she uncovers a fifteen-year-old mystery that could change everything - the truth about the Prometheus disaster - and discovers that her father will risk everything for his plans, even her.

This was a pretty engaging book. I love sci-fi, especially when they take place in the near future and in space. I give this book 3.5 out of 5 stars. The plot was interesting and it was a fast read. Some parts were a little confusing, and almost unnecessary. The character of Alejandro and his interactions with Sophia seemed to go nowhere. By the end of the book, I wasn’t sure why he was even in the book.Tom is a great character, and I’d like to see where the author goes with him. The character of Sophia was a little shallow. Maybe her character will develop more in the next book? A lot of info from the beginning of the book seemed like filler, and it wasn’t until I got to the middle and end that the plot really picked up. Overall, it’s a good sci-fi read, and the world building of Mars was great.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review. All views expressed are my own.
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I was really looking forward to this one and although the premise was great and it started off really well, I do feel that it could have been better.

I absolutely loved how the Martian landscape was described. The desolation was palpable throughout and I really enjoyed reading everything to do with Mars.

However, the other aspects of the story were not as apealing. The whole motivation of the "villains" did not make much sense to me and I think it could have been executed better.

Overall rating: 3/5 stars⭐⭐⭐

This book had a really exciting premise, and I managed to find a few bright spots, but it ultimately fell short. Well short. Tom is a sixteen year old living on the first Mars colony, a colony that has been cut off from any contact with Earth for the last eight years. Tom makes a vow to escape Mars and return to Earth, which seems to be all the motivation that the colony crew needed to actually get it done. Meanwhile on Earth there are some very boring political struggles keeping space science from progressing and from any rescue mission to get underway. After a mishap that leaves the colony leaderless Tom and JT, the only adult in the story who is not a megalomanic or a useless idiot, escape the and make their way to Earth, or die trying.

I'll start with what I liked about the book. Pahl is at his best when he's waxing poetical about the desolate Martian landscape and the grandeur of space. Tom spends several chapters traveling over the surface in a make-shift blimp, leaving the tiny spaces of the colony for the first time and the descriptions of the dead, but still deadly landscape stand out. Tom's transition from being trapped in a tiny enclosure on the surface of Mars, to freely navigating the Martian skies, to seeing Mars and later Earth from orbit was a joy to read. Unfortunately, the joy pretty much ended there.

The rest of the book was filled with a painfully uninteresting political drama on Earth. In a bizarrely tone-deaf twist, the environmentalists are the villains who want to end any and all space travel by any means necessary. Not due to pollution caused by burning rocket fuel, or anything like that, no, due to an imagined "Martian Plague" that they need to keep Earth pure of. The Capitalists on the other side of the conflict are equally villainous and seem to have no motivation other than to ruin the lives of their teenage children. This whole story-line comes to a groan-inducing climax, with one of the forgettable main characters exclaiming "moderates to the rescue!" Seriously.

There was also a love interest side plot that felt pretty much pointless and shoe-horned in. The characters were flat and their love scenes cringey. One of the young lovers goes from being a POV character with his own boring problems to falling completely off the map, to being casually mentioned in the very last chapter. The continuity didn't make any sense at all.

In fact, continuity was a problem throughout. The frequency with which Pahl jumps from Mars to Earth was jarring, focusing on one theater for several chapters at a time, only to be interrupted by a single, two page chapter from another POV. At one point he introduces a new POV character, in the middle of book, who turns out to be a non-factor side character. The structure of this book is badly in need of an editor.

Tom's plot was a story I would recommend reading, and Pahl's writing is worth a look when he's at his best. But this book was mess. It was indy published, so hopefully it gets put in the hands of an experienced editor and Pahl gets a chance to do some rethinking. Until that happens, two stars.

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this book

well i havent really tried this genre before...it somewhat held my attention but its not star trek...but i gave it a go..not really for me sorry

Posted on Goodreads:

"3.5 stars

eARC provided by NetGalley in return for honest review.

The Martian is one of my favourite sci-fi books so when I read the synopsis of Martian Blood I knew I had to read it!

Martian Blood depicts our world in the nearish future, where the internet has evolved so you can walk around in videos, AI is now something akin to Iron Man's Jarvis, and after years of climate change, famines, and war, the political landscape has changed entirely. One of the main antagonists are the Earth First party, which are against any further space travel - especially Cita Stone, who is hell bent on stopping Sophia's father launch another ship to Mars. This anti-space group is a new take for me in this type of novel but actually is probably pretty realistic. I have to admit, I found them incredibly frustrating in their evangelical behaviour, but I suppose that's the point!

The story is told predominantly through the eyes of Tom - a teenager born on Mars', trapped there with his parents and the rest of the crew, with no way to contact Earth; a Sophia, daughter of the man who had built the ship meant to rescue the stranded Mars crew, which had exploded before launch, killing a number of "Earth Firsters". They are both believable as teenagers which is a refreshing change from many novels where the teens are perfectly mature heros. They are emotional, and lean to being shelfish at times (Sophia especially), but it demonstrates the differences in their lives perfectly.

My only complaint is that I felt very disorientated in this future earth, I didn't feel like I understood enough about who people actually were in this future, and the power they had (was Sophia's father just a CEO, or is he governmental in some way?) - maybe I missed something early on, but it made it difficult for me to follow what everything actually meant. While I'm glad the author didn't just info-dump everything at the start as this often makes the first chapter or two a slog, it did mean that some things were explained to late in the story (e.g. how blips and the blipverse/sphere actually work).

I think most people will find the above easy to look past though, just my need to know everything and hence feeling out of it means I had to put it down to a 3.5 stars.

Overall, a great novel - there's clearly a lot more going on than we know so far, so I'll be excited to read the rest of series when it's out!"

Book lags at times and I felt the dialogue dragged on. Overall plot is interesting. The character development needs some work.

I’m a sucker for Mars stories. The description and some positive reviews lured me into this ARC. What I found were extremely wooden characters, a huge cast of badly introduced characters, and ridiculous dialogues which I endured for some 80 pages.
There are numerous ways to die on Mars. Committing suicide by hanging yourself ain't one, because of the low gravity - Red Rising needs two additional people to gather and hang on your legs so that one could die. It is far easier to just leave the airlock unprotected, and Mars will kill you fast. But Amina "hanged herself" in chapter 1, and that already got me startled.

I decided to DNF it at 30% due to a completely unbelievable event: The main protagonist‘s father went out to retrieve a transponder from an old lander, the "Sitefinder" far off, traveling there by a kind of airship. (Of course, the author meant "Pathfinder" and corrected the wording later on, leaving with an inconsistent naming.) Just when he came back, a dust devil came near, forced the whole construction to break and the father was dead. Yes, dust devils exist on Mars. But in no way would they crush a transport and build up so much inertia that a sturdy faceplate would break from the fall. Remember that Mars has low gravity and a very low atmospheric density? It needs a storm of 65km/h to be able to lift up dust from the surface.
Both, the badly researched physics of Mars and the unbelievable probability of the event, drove me off. Self-publication only goes so far, and this work is in dire need of an editor. I read a couple of pages further but the reactions of the people were comically bad.

I wouldn’t recommend it even to YA folks because a Mars SF novel should reflect the known realities on that planet, at least.

I really enjoyed this book. Tom's journey with JP really drew me in and kept me glued to my screen as I read through. The whole premise is engaging because we'll be at the point of space travel and colonies on other planets in the not-so-far future. As for what held me back from giving it 5 stars- I felt like the beginning of the book was slightly hard to get into. You're put into this new world with new slang and jumping between two (soon to be three,then back down to two) characters. It took an adjustment period to find a groove but once I did I feel as if it went by quickly. I'm also curious to why we lost Alejandro's narration? At the end he's still a character referenced by Sofia and others but he kinda drops out of telling the story. We have him narrating for maybe 3 or 4 chapters and then he becomes background again. I hope in the next book we're given a reasoning as to why his narration is gone/the on-going drama with him and his dad. I'm excited to continue this series and see how everything plays out. I'll be keeping my eyes out for Noctilucents #2!

Martian Blood: Noctilucents Volume One is an exciting read. Most YA Sci-Fi novels take a while to get into as it's a lot of world-building. Not with this book, you are hooked from the first page, it's fast-paced, original and well worth a read.

It's honestly been a really long time since I've read a Sci-Fi that made me so excited! Made sure to set aside time to read this because once you start you won't be able to stop. This really has everything, good characters, people in Mars, action, some political intrigue and the repercussions socially and environmentally of space missions. The writing is so good that at times you feel you're actually on Mars. But the most interesting thing about this book is the world building and technology, the author made me, a huge fan of science fiction, not be able to stop reading until I was finished. I can't wait to see where the series goes. The only problematic thing I found was the relationship between two character: Sophia and Ricardo, the way she thinks after not accepting to take drugs offered by him made me feel concern. Overall a really interesting read, at first I thought it would be a book like The Martian by Andy Weir but I was pleasantly surprised by how much depth and how complete this read was.