soph (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophia_sol) wrote2018-12-18 06:14 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2018-12-18 06:14 pm
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green
So I have been watching Hank Green be a person on the internet for......a lot of years. I started watching the Vlogbrothers channel (which he does along with his brother John) in January 2009 which is, dear lord, very nearly 10 years ago at this point.
This is Hank Green’s first book. At first I wasn’t planning on reading it because it didn’t really sound like my kind of thing, but then Hank did a video of himself reading the first chapter aloud and I found myself interested. So I got the book from the library and read it!
This is a book set in the modern world (modern USA no less) about internet fame and alien communication. Which, of those three points of data about the book, only one is actually calculated to appeal to me (ALIENS). But Hank Green is nonetheless good at being fairly consistently compelling, so I enjoyed the book anyway.
One of the things that struck me is that it very much reads like a thing Hank Green wrote. Which, as may be evidenced by how many hours of my life I’ve spent listening to him talk on youtube, is not a bad thing to my mind. But it does read as kind of all being one voice, which means that the dialogue does not quite come across as believable conversations.
When I was about a third of the way into the book I went onto wikipedia to spoil myself for where the book was going because I like spoilers, and then found myself rather annoyed at one of the directions the book ends up going in. I almost gave up reading the book at that point, but I stuck it out and just skimmed past the plot point I disliked, and in the end I’m glad I did.
The thing I don’t like....okay so this requires a little background. The main character, April May (and by the way I LOVE HER NAME) has become an internet celebrity on the topic of these weird alien statue things (called Carls) that appeared all over the world and seem to be communicating with humanity via a vast shared dream with puzzles to decode. April is very consciously constructing her public persona around themes of like, belief in the goodness of both humanity and aliens. And there springs up an anti-April, anti-Carl movement, and April discovers this and responds by PUBLICLY DEBATING THE LEADER’S POINTS and then his followership balloons as a result of the extra attention and gets pretty hateful and violent and stuff, and I’m just like....a) APRIL HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF THE OVERTON WINDOW, and b) I GET ENOUGH OF THIS KIND OF BULLSHIT FROM REALITY AND I DON’T NEED IT IN MY FICTION. So I skimmed past every section that involved Peter Petrawicki because no.
And of course that whole thing is very plot-relevant because April ends up being murdered by people who were part of the movement Petrawicki started so like, the entire second half of the book is shaped by the plot point I don’t like. Which is frustrating but whatever.
Okay I should talk about the things I did like in the book because there is plenty to like, honestly. I just...have less to say about those parts, whoops.
April was very believably a flawed and realistic human being who I nonetheless cared deeply about even while she made some TERRIBLE LIFE CHOICES but also some pretty admirable ones.
...okay honestly that’s the thing I liked best about the book. April May is a good time to hang about with and listen to what she has to say. And since that’s what the whole book is, it really works! The book is written from April’s first-person perspective but very clearly from some point in the future after the end of the book when she’s had the chance to think stuff over a bunch, and it all hangs together really well.
But that leads into....dangit cliffhanger ending! I want to know what happens next! I am not good at serial storytelling.
As I mentioned above, April dies - in a rather dramatic scene involving a burning warehouse and a livestream of something like a billion viewers. She is very definitively dead. She is clear about that. But also - at the end of the book she’s pretty clearly not and it probably has something to do with the aliens and I want to KNOW.
Hopefully there will be a sequel. Hopefully I will still care about the sequel whenever it is that the sequel comes out!
This is Hank Green’s first book. At first I wasn’t planning on reading it because it didn’t really sound like my kind of thing, but then Hank did a video of himself reading the first chapter aloud and I found myself interested. So I got the book from the library and read it!
This is a book set in the modern world (modern USA no less) about internet fame and alien communication. Which, of those three points of data about the book, only one is actually calculated to appeal to me (ALIENS). But Hank Green is nonetheless good at being fairly consistently compelling, so I enjoyed the book anyway.
One of the things that struck me is that it very much reads like a thing Hank Green wrote. Which, as may be evidenced by how many hours of my life I’ve spent listening to him talk on youtube, is not a bad thing to my mind. But it does read as kind of all being one voice, which means that the dialogue does not quite come across as believable conversations.
When I was about a third of the way into the book I went onto wikipedia to spoil myself for where the book was going because I like spoilers, and then found myself rather annoyed at one of the directions the book ends up going in. I almost gave up reading the book at that point, but I stuck it out and just skimmed past the plot point I disliked, and in the end I’m glad I did.
The thing I don’t like....okay so this requires a little background. The main character, April May (and by the way I LOVE HER NAME) has become an internet celebrity on the topic of these weird alien statue things (called Carls) that appeared all over the world and seem to be communicating with humanity via a vast shared dream with puzzles to decode. April is very consciously constructing her public persona around themes of like, belief in the goodness of both humanity and aliens. And there springs up an anti-April, anti-Carl movement, and April discovers this and responds by PUBLICLY DEBATING THE LEADER’S POINTS and then his followership balloons as a result of the extra attention and gets pretty hateful and violent and stuff, and I’m just like....a) APRIL HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF THE OVERTON WINDOW, and b) I GET ENOUGH OF THIS KIND OF BULLSHIT FROM REALITY AND I DON’T NEED IT IN MY FICTION. So I skimmed past every section that involved Peter Petrawicki because no.
And of course that whole thing is very plot-relevant because April ends up being murdered by people who were part of the movement Petrawicki started so like, the entire second half of the book is shaped by the plot point I don’t like. Which is frustrating but whatever.
Okay I should talk about the things I did like in the book because there is plenty to like, honestly. I just...have less to say about those parts, whoops.
April was very believably a flawed and realistic human being who I nonetheless cared deeply about even while she made some TERRIBLE LIFE CHOICES but also some pretty admirable ones.
...okay honestly that’s the thing I liked best about the book. April May is a good time to hang about with and listen to what she has to say. And since that’s what the whole book is, it really works! The book is written from April’s first-person perspective but very clearly from some point in the future after the end of the book when she’s had the chance to think stuff over a bunch, and it all hangs together really well.
But that leads into....dangit cliffhanger ending! I want to know what happens next! I am not good at serial storytelling.
As I mentioned above, April dies - in a rather dramatic scene involving a burning warehouse and a livestream of something like a billion viewers. She is very definitively dead. She is clear about that. But also - at the end of the book she’s pretty clearly not and it probably has something to do with the aliens and I want to KNOW.
Hopefully there will be a sequel. Hopefully I will still care about the sequel whenever it is that the sequel comes out!