An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

If you came across an absolutely remarkable thing at 3 a.m. in New York City, would you walk away . . . or do the one thing that would change your life forever?

The Carls just appeared. Coming home from work at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship – like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armour – April and her friend Andy make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. The next day April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world, and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the centre of an intense international media spotlight.

Now April has to deal with the pressure on her relationships, her identity and her safety that this new position brings, all while being on the front lines of the quest to find out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us.

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This was my first real venture into a sc-fi/alien invasion book and it did not disappoint. I didn’t really know what I was getting into with this story, I was mostly expecting it to be a fun and quirky read and it is, but it goes so much deeper than that. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, more so than anything else, feels like a really big message (even a warning?) about everything that can come with instant fame; particularly through social media, the addiction of attention, about losing your identity, about what people with extremist views are capable of. What kind of freaked me out a little bit was how easy it is to imagine the events of this book really happening. The seriously creepy ending of the book came as a complete shock to me and I’m so glad there’s going to be a sequel because that was one heck of a cliff hanger!

P.S. I will never look at grape jam/jelly in the same way again. Nope.

Thank you very much to Orion Publishing Group, Netgalley and Hank Green for a review ebook copy of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.