THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“Sparkling with mystery, humor and the uncanny, this is a fun read. But beneath its effervescent tone, more complex themes are at play.” —San Francisco ChronicleIn his wildly entertaining debut novel, Hank Green—cocreator of Crash Course, Vlogbrothers, and SciShow—spins a sweeping, cinematic tale about a young woman who becomes an overnight celebrity before … SciShow—spins a sweeping, cinematic tale about a young woman who becomes an overnight celebrity before realizing she’s part of something bigger, and stranger, than anyone could have possibly imagined.
The Carls just appeared.
Roaming through New York City 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 armor—April and her best 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—from Beijing to Buenos Aires—and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight.
Seizing the opportunity to make her mark on the world, April now has to deal with the consequences her new particular brand of fame has on her relationships, her safety, and her own identity. And all eyes are on April to figure out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us.
Compulsively entertaining and powerfully relevant, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing grapples with big themes, including how the social internet is changing fame, rhetoric, and radicalization; how our culture deals with fear and uncertainty; and how vilification and adoration spring for the same dehumanization that follows a life in the public eye. The beginning of an exciting fiction career, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a bold and insightful novel of now.
more
I guess this is mainly about a young woman who is on a journey of growth while exploring a extra-terrestrial mystery. She pays for her impulsively with her life… Or does she?
I could not put this book down. Green did a spectacular job of addressing the social media mania of our current culture through dynamic characters and an original storyline.
I found this novel exceptional. When I finished it compulsively late at night this novel kept the brain twirling until I had to find another novel to help me escape this very interesting premise/world.
If you’re going to read this book, there are a few things you need to understand first:
1. This is NOT young adult.
2. Hank Green is not John Green. They’re brothers, but that does not mean they’re writing the same types of books.
3. If you go into this expecting a YA contemporary similar to John Green, you’re not going to find it.
Okay, NOW you’re allowed to read this book.
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is unlike any book I’ve ever read. Not only did it discuss topics that I don’t usually see in books and that feel so important in today’s world, but it did so using a completely unique premise, an engaging storyline, and a complex protagonist.
Our main character is twenty-three year old April May, who stumbles upon a ten-foot-tall statue in New York City at 3 AM. After making a video with her best friend Andy, wherein she names the statue Carl, April discovers that identical statues have appeared simultaneously all over the world without explanation, and thanks to her now-viral video, she is at the center of the mystery of where the Carls came from.
April is not a particularly likable character, but she is unquestionably one of the most interesting characters I’ve read in a while. (This may have something to do with the fact that I adore unlikeable characters.) Even as she acting in ways that hurt her loved ones or put her in dangerous situations, she is aware of how horrible she’s being, yet unable to stop herself. That feels so true to life to me. People are flawed, but just because they recognize a flaw about themselves doesn’t mean they are in a position or willing to fix it. April is in a high-stress situation where she would rather focus on the Carl mystery than her personal problems, causing her to act irrationally.
Adding to that, the narration is clearly from somewhere in the future, where she knows that she has messed up somewhere along the line. Looking back, she can point to the exact moments where she failed or made the wrong decision, but she can’t do anything to stop them. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion, or watching Icarus fly closer to the sun and being helpless to prevent his fall. This narrative distance is such a cool way of telling the story because the reader also knows that something is going to go wrong, yet all we can do is wait for it to happen.
In addition, April has such a distinctive and entertaining voice, both funny and frustrating in equal measure. She is snarky and emotionally closed off, but she is also fascinated and enthusiastic about the mystery. For me, the writing of April’s voice was a definite strong point of the book.
I read a lot of reviews while I was trying to formulate my thoughts on this book, and a surprising number of them accused April of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl™. Besides my immediate aversion to that term and the ways it is used to devalue female characters unfairly, I don’t understand how this could be applied to April. To my understanding, the MPDG is supposed to be, well, a dream girl, and the way I read April was anything but. April is a mess, and she acknowledges this many times in the book. She even laughs at herself for thinking she was “special” and “quirky” for not liking Twitter and thinking she was above it all, so I’m a little lost how anyone could read her character this way. In other news, I shouldn’t be allowed to read negative reviews of books I love because they make me irrationally angry.
Truly, this was such an intelligent book. Obviously Hank Green is a smart guy, considering all his various projects, but it shone through in this book. Not only in the mystery elements, which were so cleverly put together, but the ideas the book explored as well. A main theme was fame: the reality of being thrust into the spotlight, how people look to you to be a leader even if you’re unqualified, how you become more of a symbol than a human being. In addition, the book explored ideas about how extremism and polarization happens and the horrifying destructive potential of humanity as well as our capacity for creating beauty and wonder. I felt like I was getting smarter with every page I read.
Although this is technically a sci-fi novel, those aspects of it were pretty soft, placing it somewhere between sci-fi and contemporary. While the Carls and the mystery surrounding them were obviously a main focus of the book, it was more interested in April’s journey and experiences alongside them than anything else. This is undeniably a First Contact story, though it focuses more on the humans than the aliens.
During the few days that I was reading this book, I didn’t want to put it down. When I was nearing the end, I was glued to every word, simultaneously screaming at the page and tearing up. If you’ve heard anything about this book, you might have heard that it has quite the ending. I didn’t initially know that it was going to be a series, so you can imagine my relief when I went to Goodreads after finishing it and saw that “Untitled” Book 2 there! I really really really really really need to know what happens next!
This is a book that I went into with very little knowledge of what to expect, picking it up mostly because I admire Hank Green as a person and had seen a fair bit of hype around this release, and I ended up being blown away. From the quality of writing to the thought-provoking ideas to the complex characters, this book surprised me in every possible way. I highly recommend you pick it up because it, itself, is an absolutely remarkable thing.
I read this book to share with my fifteen year old granddaughter and to broaden my literary horizons. Left to myself, this is not the type of book I would have chosen but; I found it engrossing.
Definable unique concept. Got very wordy near the end.
I loved it!
The only thing I don’t like about it is that I have to wait to find out what happens next.
It’s a fun read with great characters. Very zeitgeist. I don’t know how relatable it will be in 10 years, but who cares. Read it now and not in 10 years.
There was a lot of space in this book dedicated to commentary about society and the internet and the combination of the two, and this often required a little extra brain work to stay in it, but it was still so good! The story of the Carls arriving was interesting and so unexpected, yet the world was so grounded in reality that I forgot they didn’t actually exist.
I often found myself conflicted between wanting to finish the story so I could think about it, and not wanting it to end because I was enjoying it so much.
Millennial claptrap.
Holy crap this book is amazing