About time I checked this one out, I think. I’ve been wanting to see what so many people were talking about, and I’ve been watching the vlogbrothers for years now. Not big on John Green’s books1 but this was a genre book so maybe it would be a better fit for me!
The book follows April May, who finds an interesting statue on the streets of New York and becomes an internet sensation and the face of what turns out to be an alien invasion of sorts. The aliens have come bearing a message and they have chosen April as the person to deliver it, even if she has no idea what they’re trying to say. Fortunately, there are dreams and a whole network of people trying to solve them in order to figure out the puzzle.
The story does a thing that I like a lot2 — use the fantastical elements as a backdrop to frame a more human story. The core of this focuses much more on what celebrity does to April, how she reacts and changes because of it, and the people who come into her life because of it.
With the focus so squarely on April, it makes the world feel both larger and smaller in that there are several things that happen that have nothing to do with her that she hears about secondhand or in passing. I love seeing that in fiction, especially since I feel like a lot of books these days feel the need to bring everything into the foreground and force the leads to participate in every piece of the narrative.
Overall, I liked it! It’s an interesting look into what that kind of sudden celebrity can do to a person, and the aliens provided an interesting frame to the story. I also really liked what was being done with the aliens, how they communicated, and that feeling that the story was bigger than what was on the page. It’s a great read!