Earth Girl is an emotional, beautifully written novel about discrimination, perseverance, revenge and respect. Set around seven hundred years into the future, very little seems different compared to today, with the exception of space travel through gateways. Though seemingly a straightforward concept, this travel method is complicated by the fact that not every person can travel through the gateways safely. Some people are biologically unable to travel; the transition causes massive system failure and death. Therefore, while the vast majority of people on Earth are able to launch themselves onto new worlds and new futures, a small percentage remain chained to a polluted and forgotten planet.

On Earth, the millions of humans left behind generally hate their fate. They are looked down upon by those able to to flit about the universe, and they resent their fate and the people able to handle the transition through these inter-stellar gateways. One of these earth-bound beings is Jarra, who comes of age at 18 years and plots her revenge. Given a choice of schools or vocations, she elects to join an archeology team, pretending to be from off-planet. People who live among the stars call the Earth-bound ‘apes’ and other derogatory terms. Many children are abandoned by their parents, left behind on Earth as orphans who grow up in communal schools, so many in fact that they must share adoptive parents. Jarra burns with the desire to show her classmates that she is just as smart as they are, just as capable. And that she is, since she has boot-strapped herself with skills and knowledge from other excursions as part of her growing up on Earth. She knows how to wield heavy machinery, how to dig in archeological sites, and even how to pilot aircraft, a rare talent on Earth. In fact, Jarra seems driven almost from birth to prove herself, to better herself and gain skills and knowledge even few off-worlders possess or want to possess. While she can be annoying at times, she's not super-human, but very, very human.

Only one other person in her team is aware of her secret, and this happens to be the instructor in charge. Bound by confidentiality, he still makes life difficult for her, testing her with a variety of challenges in front of her classmates, yet she seems to pass each test with flying colors. As the university students begin to learn the ins and outs of an archeology dig in an ancient Earth city, they begin to bond, but not without their share of prejudices and disagreements. When humans scattered to the stars, they settled in different areas of space. Each of these areas developed their own social traditions. Some are restrained socially and sexually, while others are the opposite. They all seem to share a fear and aversion to the Earth-bound who were left behind, fearing their condition is contagious.

When Jarra and another student begin to develop feeling for each other, her initial plans begin to unravel. She realizes that not everyone in her team deserves the scorn she planned to heap on them at the end of the semester, when she planned to stand up and reveal her true nature, and that all semester they had been working and living with an Earth-bound ape girl, one just as skilled and talented as they were.

Jarra also discovers her true parents, an event both heartwarming and tragic. In fact, it seemed almost an act of cruelty from the author to reveal something as important and life-changing as this to Jarra and the reader, and then take an unexpected twist of events to alter this state of mind.

Although Janet Edwards' future is almost a thousand years away from our own, the people generally deal with the same issues as today, and the technology seems only slightly more advanced, with the exception of these gateways. Still, the story is compelling, and the growth of the protagonist and her plucky ability inspire hope rather than scorn. This novel appears part of a series, and so it will be interesting to see how Edwards explores the worlds beyond Earth, and whether her young heroine will see what lies beyond. The society Edwards reveals seems almost too homogenous; despite the far-flung travels there is still a shared heritage, language and culture that transcends certain differences. And yet, as Edwards shows, prejudice's ugly side can be met and overcome.