Ahoy there me mateys!  Mira Grant is the pen name for Seanan McGuire's sci-fi & horror tales.  This is her newest about an alien invasion coming soon to an Earth near you.  When Anastasia "Stasia" Miller was three years old, she got lost in the woods and was enticed by a weird alien plant.  When she immerges several days later, she tells everyone that she is an alien in disguise as a human and that the armada is coming.  No one believes her.

Except Stasia is telling the truth.  The alien plant has consumed her human self and taken her place.  She has no other facts about the invasion.  No timeline.  No idea what she is supposed to do in the meantime.  And no choice but to keep repeating the truth of her nature to everyone she meets.  Needless to say, she isn't extremely popular.

Stasia has a handful of friends, a boyfriend named Graham, and a cat named Seymour who tolerate her alien quirkiness.  Then one day, an alien signal is received by Earth.  The invasion is finally coming to pick Stasia up.  Humans are beginning to believe in aliens.  The government is involved.  And Stasia finds others of her kind.  That is just the beginning of Stasia's crazy adventure and the take down of Earth.

I began reading this in e-book form and switched to the audiobook.  I absolutely loved the set-up for this novel.  Reading about Stasia's disappearance, return, and foray into human adulthood was fascinating.  There is a bit of body horror involving the plant and it was creepy and awesome.  I also loved when Stasia realized that there were other aliens like her planted (ha!) on Earth.

Unfortunately for me, I felt that this book was not as interesting once the alien signal was introduced.  And when the government gets involved around the 38% mark I was less than enthused.  I think this is because the novel went from a focus on character relationships to a more action novel flavor.  Also Stasia really spends a lot of time waffling about the same existential questions.  Because she and the other aliens don't really know anything about what the invasion will do, the reader has to spend a lot of time just waiting alongside them. 

Once invasion day starts (62%), the pace picked back up again.  I enjoyed a lot Stasia and the other aliens interactions with the invaders.  I appreciated how Earth's humans were never going to win.  But I found the overall goals of the aliens to be rather silly.  About a third of this book really floated my boat so I am glad I read it and I have been thinking about it a lot.  I just think that the majority of this book wasn't to my personal taste.  Arrrr!

Side note: what actually happened to Seymour?  Did I miss where he ended up?