Lone Star Renegades - A YA Space Adventure!

Name's Collin Frost. I'm your average, run-of-the-mill, completely forgettable seventeen-year-old high school nobody. Buckle up, folks, 'cause this is my story ... the thrilling tale of how my already bottom-of-the-barrel life went from "why me?" to "seriously, universe, what did I do to deserve this?"

I guess I should start at the beginning ... you know, that magical moment right before we got sucked up into a freaking alien spaceship. Because apparently, my life wasn't enough of a cosmic joke already.

Picture this: we're on the way back from yet another soul-crushing game. I'm the kicker, a.k.a. the guy who gets blamed when things go south. Spoiler alert: we lost. Because of yours truly. Shocking, I know. Try to contain your surprise.

But wait, it gets better! Our rust bucket of a school bus pulls up to another thrilling railroad crossing in yet another "blink and you'll miss it" town in the vast emptiness of rural Texas. At first, I'm too busy wallowing in my own misery to notice what's got everyone else's jaws on the floor. Then I see it, hovering in the sky like the world's biggest "screw you" to physics ... a spaceship the size of, I don't know, Texas itself?

So there I am, watching the 6:15 Amtrak (probably the most exciting thing to happen in this town since color TV) get slurped up into the spaceship's gaping maw like some cosmic spaghetti. And wouldn't you know it, we're next on the menu. Straight into the bowels of what we later discovered was called a "sim rover collector ship." Fancy name for a flying porta-potty, if you ask me.

Do we survive this little detour from hell? Shockingly, yes. In fact, our ragtag bunch of alien abduction survivors actually starts kicking some extraterrestrial butt. At least for a while ... But hey, I'm getting ahead of myself. Don't want to spoil all the fun, right?

Just remember, sometimes ... and I mean like once in a blue moon ... the scrawny, uncoordinated kid who couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag actually becomes somewhat useful. Who knows? Maybe he even gets the girl. But let's not get crazy here - my luck isn't that good. The universe isn't done laughing at me yet.

Reviews:

Lone Star Renegades by Mark Wayne McGinnis / Enjoyable reading
Nice mixture of characters and behaviors reflecting typical teen fluctuations with the added excitement and young adult scifi, space opera, space travel, aliens, and warfare. The development of a cohesive group was optimistic at its best. Teens who provide hope for the protection of Earth. What a wonderful prospect.- Sandra

A SyFy Novel of Suspense, Mystery, Murder, Kidnapping of a Planet
This is a thrilling teen space opera - an excellent YA science fiction book, Mark Wayne McGinnis has written of a society that instead of doing their own mining that finds a planet with a pre-space society and sends the materials via larger transport barges. This time they picked up a Texas High School Football Team. Little did the people who owned the barge know what havoc a Texas Football.- Kindle Customer

Best YA SciFi Space Opera I've Read in a Decade!
Kudos to Mark Wayne McGinnis. I did not know this was a teen scifi book until I started reading it. Turns out it didn't matter. Great writing is great writing. When a group of teenagers in a school bus get abducted (along with the school bus) the great space opera begins. All the characters from the captain of the football team to the coming-of-age nerd are fleshed out and full of surprises. - Katherine