Terrible half-baked review of a really good book.

I think I’ve really done this book an injustice by waiting so long to review it. (Thanks a lot, Mansfield Park!) I remember being ridiculously entertained by it, and reading it at a pretty fast pace, even for me. But I’ve forgotten most of why I found it so entertaining in the two and a half months since finishing it.

This is one of those sci-fi books just waiting to break into the mainstream, because it’s written in a way that will appeal to people who aren’t usually sci-fi fans. (Not sure it has the hook necessary to do, so, though, so we’ll see if that actually happens.) It’s told in the form of confidential interviews, as our mysterious ‘narrator’ seems to be creating classified files of the events as they occur. This format is fun and keeps the book moving at a fast pace, but it also sort of keeps you at a distance from the characters (one of the reasons I didn’t give it the fifth star).

Most of the reviews I’ve read of this don’t give very much away in terms of the plot, and I won’t either, because the plot surprises are half the fun. It starts with a little girl falling into a hole in the 1980s, and what she finds at the bottom is a giant hand clearly not made by any human civilization. It goes from there.

I will definitely have to re-read this before the sequel (not sure when that’s coming out), but I won’t mind at all because it was such a good time. Highly recommend this one.