I picked this up in a bookshop and started reading and it captivated me. There’s lots of well written, interesting characters and the text feels very chatty, I found most of the book a delight to read. The narrative sticks close to twenty year old Cora who gets picked as a kind of translator by an alien who has come to Earth in 2007. Coincidentally (obviously not) Cora’s estranged dad runs some kind of Wikileaks-but-with-aliens thing. I found the detailed descriptions of everything made it all seem alarmingly believable. Plus it was a comforting flashback to a time when perhaps the worst thing you could believe a US president would do was deny knowing anything about extraterrestrial species on earth.

Later in the book things started to feel more outlandish (like alien landings didn’t 🤷‍♀️) and as the story developed I started to worry that the author wasn’t going to have a good ending for it, and I think my worries were justified. I knew there was a sequel¹ and I think I’ll probably read it as I enjoyed the overall story and there’s a whole heap of background stuff that was realised but not explored here. Whilst I didn’t find the ending of this particular act of the story especially satisfying I did enjoy the world created, the way the aliens were characterised and the way it was written.