I'm stealing the series description just to get the basic plot elements out of the way on this one:
"Part science fiction, part fantasy, and completely engrossing, this provocative manga stars sensitive high school student Alice Sakaguchi, who has a recurring dream that she's part of a team of alien scientists on the moon. She doesn't really believe it, until new evidence arrives. Now even her eight-year-old neighbor is acting strange. Alice's dreams of being a lovely woman living on the moon are a respite from her job babysitting the holy terror Rin. When he goes one step too far, she slaps him, causing him to fall off a balcony and into a coma. When he awakens, he seems changed — and strangely connected to Alice. Meanwhile, at school, Alice meets a pair of boys with an oddly close relationship. Soon she learns they too have dreams — of living on the moon."
That pretty much sums up the plot, which is interesting in itself but not really what makes this series such a draw. What holds the series together are the thematic threads that are woven between the two different stories being told at the same time — the story of Alice's alienating experiences as a newcomer at her high school and the group of dreamers that she meets (many of whom later turn out to have special powers), and the story of the people living on the moon that unfolds slowly like a mystery, or like an almost forgotten dream that returns bit by bit during the day.
The first theme that comes into play is the theme of existential homelessness. Alice is out of place at her new school, but that's just really an expression of the out-of-placeness that most adolescents work with on a daily basis. Alice's family has moved because her father has a new job, a circumstance that calls attention to capitalism's tendency to create rootlessness and destroy tradition. Alice finds herself adrift in a plastic urban landscape where locality has no meaning except as a place of residence and where the bulk of immediate relationships available are either constituted by meaningless obligation or the brutal group dynamics of the high-school clique. The desire for home, for a feeling of belonging, is foregrounded in the opening pages: “The moon ... full and bright — a mystery. It makes me feel ... homesick. I want to go home. I want to go home ... all I want ... is to go home.”
One of the ways this desire for belonging plays out is in the classic opposition between natural space and urban space. Alice has moved from the countryside to the city where concrete dominates. Alice has a special relationship to the natural world — a spontaneous ability to communicate with plants and animals — that clearly symbolizes a type of spiritual and unmediated oneness with the universe itself. In the city however, concrete — and the forms of negative sociality that it represents — prevents Alice from having this kind of deep contact with the world. The opening image, of a cosmically large Alice embracing an aura-encircled Earth while floating in a space shower of cherry blossoms, is the apotheosis of the desire to belong, a complete absorption into universality.
The desire for belonging plays out in another way too, however, in the classic style of outsiders banding together. Jinpachi and Issei, two students in Alice’s class, have been having identical dreams about having once lived a different life on the moon as different people. In sharing these dreams together they form a bond that’s completely their own, and completely outside of the normative types of bonding that define high-school sociality. In a way it’s almost like the fantasy worlds that children create and share, or the worlds of fantasy and science fiction that are consumed and shared among the geeks of the world, who are often equally as ostracized. A really important element here is, of course, the idea shared by Jinpachi and Issei that they are not really only themselves, but also the aliens Gyokuran and Enju. This highlights the desire we have to inhabit identities other than the ones we already exist as (one of the very reasons we read fiction), and sounds very much like the common fantasy that Freud identified among children of having secretly been adopted. In this fantasy you discover one day that your parents are not really your parents and that instead you come from a family with a great lineage. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" by James Thurber both engage with a similar theme — the impossibility of being heroic in an age in which social pressure pushes the individual to conform, be a good subject, and get to work on time without complaint. When the option of become a hero is foreclosed, the next best thing is to fantasize about heroics, to fantasize about being someone completely different than you are. (Of course, in Please Save My Earth, the point is that everyone really is completely different than they are, but it is a fantasy, after all.)
A final theme that plays a major role in this series is the theme of identity. Almost all of the characters in this series have multiple identities (a bit like Dax from Deep Space Nine), and the series spends a lot of time playing around with what it means to carry multiple selves inside. Of course, this is also a major theme of adolescent life, in which a high-school student might present one way at home, one way at school, and one way within a particular peer group. Hiwatari approaches this question on a much deeper level, however, basically asking what it might mean to have a particular type of ‘soul’ in a world in which you’re not allowed to be that soul. In the first issue this plays out as a question of gender identity: in their past lives Enju (a woman) was in love with Gyokuran (a man), but in this life the personality Enju is made manifest in the body of Issei, which means that Issei is in love with a part of Jinpachi (Gyokuran), even though both are boys and neither is gay. It’s complicated, but it’s a complexity that is perhaps more representative of the selves we really are, rather than the fictional unities we convince ourselves must exist.
I’m making it sound like the series is all theme and no action, but this isn’t the case at all. Rin (a nine-year old with special powers who is in love with Alice) is a brat and a cipher. He also survives a nine-story fall, is able to predict the immediate future, and he can fly. There’s a scene at the end of the first book where he confronts a tough on a motorcycle that’s almost like a shojo take on Akira. There are dreams, disembodied states, and a base on the moon. The dinosaurs at the beginning of the book may or may not be involved in all this.
Highly recommended, though many comic readers may have trouble getting past Hiwatari’s somewhat naïve style (I myself love it) and/or the stylized melodrama that is part and parcel of the shojo genre.