Full disclosure, I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway, but I wasn’t aware of the author’s notoriety.

I understand that this is her first novel and that in itself is an accomplishment. It has an (somewhat) interesting plot, the pacing is OK (if inconsistent) the humour is mostly good and I had no trouble going through it and following the events. The writing and editing could use some work though, there are lots of redundancies (« a manual car with shift stick »... I mean, come on.) the vocabulary is also quite basic at times, with lots of repetitions.

That being said, this book has some serious flaws. The story a bit generic, it felt like an overlong X-Files episode at times, but through the eyes of somebody who watched Arrival and thought it was cool. I did like that she addressed a big issue with first contact: language. Even though I thought it wasn’t handled with the finesse required for such a vast subject. Again, the fact that it reads like an overlong TV episode didn’t help.

But my main issue is with the characters.

There is almost no character development, they all feel very generic. Cora is the protagonist here. She is a college dropout who lives with her mother, younger sister and brother. Her father sucks and wasn’t here for her. And that’s about all you know about her. The supporting cast gets even less attention. Very bland, uninspired characters.

So, even though the plot could be interesting, I just didn’t care what happened to Cora, her aunt or the rest of the cast. The alien got a little more attention but even then it was quite minimal, even at the end. And it doesn’t feel intended, it feels like she didn’t know how to give personality and depth to her characters.

It felt like this book was written as a movie script, with notes for the actors that said “give this character some personality” and to the director “please give the whole thing some gravitas”... because it lacked both. All the movies references and absence of literary ones also tell me that Ms. Ellis should maybe read more before writing more. If she has more literary bagage, it certainly didn’t show with this book.

You like sci-fi and want to learn about character development? Go read Dan Simmons or Ursula le Guin. I’m not saying I am expecting this level of literacy from everyone but they certainly could learn from these two.

People say that Asimov wrote very plot driven sci-fi stories with thin character development, and although this is true, his characters had way more depth than those.

So, if Ms. Ellis can give more life and personality to her characters in her future novels, I believe she could write interesting stories. But if she keeps with this way of creating her plots and characters, I’m afraid I’ll pass...