I decided to read the Roswell High series after I started to watch and fall in love with the TV series based on those books. (I’ll have more to say about the TV series later.) If you’ve watched the show, then I can tell you that while the book and the show start out almost exactly the same way, they soon take very, very different paths.
The show is better. But the books are good, if you’re willing to overlook a few glaring plausibility problems. Bear in mind that they are geared towards senior high school readers.
The premise is that the Roswell crash back in 1947 really happened and that six aliens escaped the crash and blended in with human society — one adult and five maturing embryos in pods. The pod children hatch in the 1980’s and look to be about 6 years old. Two are adopted into a loving home and one is shuffled around the foster care system. (The other two don’t come into the story in the first book.)
They don’t know anything about who they are or why they’re there, but they have special powers that they try to keep under wraps for fear of getting caught. They don’t tell anyone, not even their parents.
Then one day, a human girl named Liz is shot in the stomach and one of the aliens, present at the time, makes the life-changing decision to save her life. He had been secretly in love with her for years, so he could not let her die.
What follows is part love story, part adventure, and part mystery as the aliens and their new human friends uncover the truth about who they are and where they came from. There are ten books in all, each one following directly on the heels of the previous book. They are quick reads — I finished the series in less than a week.