paperback, 384 pages
Published Aug. 10, 2021 by St. Martin's Griffin.
It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades.
Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to …
It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades.
Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.
I enjoyed the relationship building throughout the narrative, but that was really all that carried this for me. The characters felt flat and the plot felt forced.
As far as first contact stories go, Ted Chiang, Cixin Liu, and [redacted] (the one with Rocky in it) just brought so much more depth and nuance to the table.
I consider this to be a very good first novel, which explored some aspects of first contact in ways that aren't frequently in the foreground. Once you get over the idea of this taking place in an alternate United States where 2007 unfolded very differently from the one in our world, where conspiracy websites could somehow become the focus of the world's attention, the depiction of the cybernetic aliens and the amoral intelligence agencies is not super hard to accept. And if the twenty-two year old heroine sometimes comes off as behaving more like a seventeen year old one part of the time, it's not that unreasonable considering the heavy weight of the expectations she brought onto herself. There are convenient coincidences for the sake of the plot, a few overly dramatic pronouncements, but I was mostly pleased with the stakes that increased throughout. There are emotional moments and flights …
I consider this to be a very good first novel, which explored some aspects of first contact in ways that aren't frequently in the foreground. Once you get over the idea of this taking place in an alternate United States where 2007 unfolded very differently from the one in our world, where conspiracy websites could somehow become the focus of the world's attention, the depiction of the cybernetic aliens and the amoral intelligence agencies is not super hard to accept. And if the twenty-two year old heroine sometimes comes off as behaving more like a seventeen year old one part of the time, it's not that unreasonable considering the heavy weight of the expectations she brought onto herself. There are convenient coincidences for the sake of the plot, a few overly dramatic pronouncements, but I was mostly pleased with the stakes that increased throughout. There are emotional moments and flights of interesting worldbuilding for the non-humans and their society and language that I liked. The ending doesn't really bring the plot to a solid close, but is one hundred percent a character piece involving the two most significant characters in the story.
I thought the book started out slow, with the sections showing the main character and her relations with her family holding only a little interest, picking up only when she takes off for the open road with basically no plan for what to do, picks up speed when she's detained in California and in Cheyenne Mountain. At this point, it felt like the book was going to end, but in the last third it does in a different direction with a different feel. We get the big showdown between the biggest players far away from government agents and military forces, not what I had been expecting. Up till then there was a strong theme about the scariness of government power, and it seemed like this kind of undercut that. My guess is that trying to wrap everything up in the setting which seemed to me to be the intuitive choice might have been rejected because of unpalatable logistical problems.
I think the audiobook format did a lot to make the story work for me, sliding over some of the passages that might have tripped me up on the page and pushing the action forward. I'll be looking forward to the next book in this series which I hope might explain why the author chose this particular alternate timeline.
I liked the story but I really disliked the way it was written.
