My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Orion Publishing Group -Trapeze, for the ARC.
This book is rather lengthy; at times it is just downright crazy; throughout it is entertaining. Did I enjoy reading it - absolutely! Come-on - what's not to like about the appearance of huge black robot entities appearing in major conurbations across the world?

April May is finally on her way home at 3am in New York when she comes across a huge Transformer-type sculpture on the sidewalk; other people are just walking by it as if it's the most natural thing in the world. She calls her best mate Andy and they make a video of her discovery of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. The video goes viral and begins to make them both money from the YouTube site. April May names 'him?' Carl and although news filters through that there are lots of Carls who appeared across the world all at the same time, being the first discoverer, she and Andy start raking in money from news networks and their YouTube channel Of course, as a consequence they become famous - celebrities represented by a media agency, constantly in demand for talk-shows and speaking tours.
Along the way, though, April May gets carried away with it all and although she has gained new 'friends' she begins to neglect her real friends.
A materials scientist asserts that the properties of the material of which Carl is made - just do not exist on earth, and although April May truly believes the Carls are benign, there is a growing opposition movement saying they could pose a threat.
A puzzle is discovered leading to April May and her cohort approaching a Carl and April May touching it.
Then she starts having a dream, then so do others close to her, then do others across the world.
The world has to work together to solve the mystery.

I loved the dialogue - the language can certainly be described as 'earthy'/'gritty' but it really suits April May. There were quite a few passages which really 'went on a bit' and had to skim-read to get back to the point, but that's just me.
The whole tale is entertaining and the conclusion could certainly suggest a further adventure in the pipeline - although you should make your own mind up about that.
It's quirky, quite mad and extremely thought-provoking regarding the internet and its ability to catapult anybody into the limelight with both the positives and negatives of that happening.

This is a good read. Different from anything that I have read before. I did not really like the characters but I thought the story was interesting.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Thoroughly enjoyed this - wasn't really sure what to expect but this was pretty fantastic, the whole thing was beautifully layered. The base story of First Contact is cleverly handled with some great ideas, I like the concept of unity. The insights into modern day fame, especially in relation to the Internet was insightful and I loved the fact that April May was such an honest and relatable character. The friendships and relationships were believable and full of warmth.
Am super excited about the next installment, also hoping that it isn't going to be a trilogy. A definite recommend.
4.5 stars

Just imagine huge robots land in various cities throughout the world during the night. What would you do if you came across one of them? This book is about what they did. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad but entertaining throughout. Put this one on your must read list

I really really enjoyed this book. I had no idea what to expect and was a little wary given i'm not a fan of John Green's books but i thoroughly enjoyed reading this. April isn't the most likeable protagonist but i'm a fan of complex unlikeable characters so it didn't spoil my reading experience at all. I enjoyed the sci-fi side to the story and how this was aimed at more mature audiences.

I think I'm too old for this book! I didn't really know what was happening and why. As the characters, esp April, were so unpleasant, I didn't really care either. It felt like the Emperor's New Clothes to me. But I'm sure others will enjoy it.
Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC

Difficult to put this book into any one category. A little confusing at times, but still a good read for the most part.

This is unlike anything I’ve read before and I really struggled with it. The characters were unlikeable and the story was far too slow for me. I had to make myself read to the end.

It’s probably an excellent read if it’s your preferred genre but I’m afraid it wasn’t for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

April May stumbles across a strange sculpture on the streets of New York and overnight she changes from being April May the person to April May the Brand. Everyone wants a piece of April May and everyone wants to know what she knows and what she doesn't. This book is about humanity, and being other and finding yourself. It's easy to relate to April May with the mistakes she makes and her brutual honesty. It's easy to see how in this digital age it's so easy to get caught up in the moment, maybe care more about who you are perceived to be, rather than who you are.

I loved this book. The characters, the story, the message. It's clear why this book has so many positive reviews. It's clear why people are clammering for a second. Trust me, I'll be one of them.

We are stronger together than we are apart. Is there a more perfect time to hear that message resonating through every page of a book? What an absolutely remarkable thing.

4.5 stars.
Every so often I like to mix things up with my reading and try something a little different. This was my latest challenge and I had an absolute blast reading it!
April May was on her way home after working late when she happens upon a giant sculpture; like a 10 foot tall transformer. She swiftly calls her friend Andy and together the two of them make a video, April nicknaming the installation Carl. On waking the next morning she finds that not only has her video gone viral but that dozens of "Carls" have popped up around the world. Long story short and April and Andy find themselves media darlings as they were the first on scene and their footage has been used over and over - a very lucrative thing. This is all well and good but with no one admitting responsibility for the Carls and with some very strange things happening around them, April not only has to face her fame but also her fear when the true reason for their being becomes both speculated on and realised.
Not being a typical read for me, I wasn't really sure what I was letting myself in for when I started this book. What I actually got was a wild ride of a story, jam packed with interest and intrigue, played out by some very well crafted characters. It was also a bit eye opening with respect to April's launch into fame and fortune and how things developed in that storyline. We also saw two sides to the "unknown" the trusting and the sceptical and how these interacted and clashed. Oh and there were also puzzles for the characters to work through. But I think the best for me were the relationships between the characters and how these developed along the way. All delivered in a delightful, if at times a little bonkers, way.
I've never heard of the author prior to reading this book, apart from the fact that this is his debut. So I had no preconceptions going in. Now I know a bit more about him, I can understand better the path that the book took.
All in all, a good story that has been well executed and the start of a new series to boot. With certain things left a bit unresolved at the end of this opener, I will be looking out for the next one.
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

I was quite interested in the premise behind this book. I’m a fan of YA books and find they can be quite refreshing, particularly after reading books with heavier topics. I can’t make my mind up on this one. It grabbed my attention quickly in the first few pages and held it well for the first third but then I felt a little frustrated by the plot, it started unravelling a bit for me and took a lot more concentration and I didn’t find myself enjoying it as much and was less inclined to pick it up instead of another book. Overall, I think 3/5 - strong start but lost its way a bit. Perhaps those more into sci fi than I would like it a bit more.

Thank you for the opportunity to read and review.

Delightful and intricately written - have been a big fan of Hank Green for years and great to see this astonishing work.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm not sure what genre it is, it's contemporary, it's, I guess, science fiction, it's a romance, it's adventure... When I first started to read I didn't know what I was getting into bit soon I couldn't put it down
AprilMay and her friend come across a giant ?Robot, who knows, we never truly find out. They make a youtube video about it and nothing is the same again. The book is full of their excitement, humour, their very human emotions as they try with the aid of Youtube and the Internet to solve puzzles apparently set by the robot.. Which they have named Carl, for no particular reason.
Read it, you'll enjoy it..

This is An Absolutely Remarkable book. It is a very forward looking idea,cleverly delivered. In amongst the rapid speed of the story there us humour and drama. All go to make this almost believable! The rather immature lead character who us still uncertain about where her life will take her grows up in days as she becomes a world famous internet celebrity. The hidden messages of the book are that we don't know what might come next from outer space but we do know the impact of the Internet. This book is a treat to read. I strongly recommend it.

Firstly I would like to thank NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. All the opinions and views discussed are my own.

I’ve honestly been toying with this review a little bit; I didn’t dislike the book I just honestly found it a little bit confusing, and honestly wasn’t really sure what the point of this book was. There never really felt like a solid conclusion to me in this book and I think this is in part due to the fact that this is going to be part of a series, so it is setting up an open end for the future book. Unfortunately this dimmed the book for me as I felt we never got any closure to any character.

There were aspects of this book that I really enjoyed and had me laughing, but also others that I just wasn’t interested in. I feel this book as a whole just dragged on far too long and so many aspects of this book were just so slow. I honestly just feel that this book did’t go anywhere.

I honestly didn’t warm to the character of April, but I don’t think we were meant to? One thing that did confuse me is why the Aliens?Robots? chose her – I know we are shown them directing her into Carl’s path but I don’t think it was ever really explained why specifically her.

I honestly don’t have much to say about this book and I think that really describes how I felt about this book; it didn’t really evoke any strong emotions in my at all and at no point was I absolutely gripped by it. Everything was honestly just a bit average. I won’t be buying a copy of this book for myself.

I knew that this wasn't going to be an ordinary book, but I never expected it to be what I read. With an amazing sci-fi twist, it was a story that led you on the search for fame, aliens and the truth of humanity. I loved that there was a fantastic insight into the dehumanisation of people on social media and how people can construct themselves to be whoever they want to be without thinking of the consequences. Utterly brilliant.

I’ve heard of the Green brothers – it’s hard not to have – but despite being aware of their youtube channel and John Green’s mass of books and adaptations of his books, and criticisms of both the books and the adaptations of his books, my relationship had been distant. I had never actively sought out either of them, although nor had I actively avoided them either. They were a cultural touchpoint that I could understand references to, but nothing more. Hank Green’s first book came out last year. You may remember me referencing it in the post In Defence of Bad Books – it’s a sci-fi book that played down the sci-fi in the marketing, instead trying to draw in fans of literary fiction. This seems a shame, because it’s a book about giant space robots, and SFF fans LOVE giant space robots.

This book started well, seemed easy enough to get into even if I wasn’t 100% sold on April to begin with, but by about 30% of the way in I began to actively loathe her. She was a terrible person. And despite the book being styled as a retroactive look, with regrets, at the events which unfolded, she still came across as a terrible person. The bits she acknowledged as bad seemed that she wasn’t actually all that sorry about, and those were only a tiny tiny percentage of all the other awful stuff that just made up her character and her story. Despite continually going on about trying to claim equal credit for the discovery of Carl and everything, she actually did nothing and sailed through to glory – she found the robot, but it was her friend’s video equipment and editing skills which got the message out there. She noticed a pattern happening, but she didn’t solve it – instead she got someone else to do it. She still claimed credit for the discovery, for the solution. At no point does she acknowledge that, or the fact that she pushes forward her own celebrity without considering her co-stars.

Most of this book isn’t about the robot though, or the science. It is an examination of the nature of fame, her addiction to fame, but mostly of just how great she is doing and how famous she gets, so we know how important she is. At one point April lists the different tiers of fame as she sees them, and then assesses where she sits on it. Whilst she alludes to how “gross” her behaviour is at times, but there’s no real further examination as to why it’s bad or even why she did it – aside from a few offhand mentions of how she needs to be loved and only the love of a crowd will be enough because she has a loving and supportive family, and a loving girlfriend, but apparently that’s not good enough? So she becomes obsessed with the faceless mob of her supporters. Also there were brief, almost perfunctory comments on how bizarre her behaviour was, followed by lengthy discussions on how great the outcome was or how proud she is of it. It doesn’t fit.

On Hank Green’s website, he describes the book as being about a group of friends who accidentally become the most important people in the world. I read the book and honestly thought it was about April and her hubris. I wouldn’t have recognised the book was about any of the other characters. They’re all props, almost, and get no development compared to April. This could be Harry Potter Syndrome, in that she’s so self-involved that she just doesn’t notice the people around her – which at one point she acknowledges – but in Harry Potter the background characters still did get developed. Harry was oblivious but the reader wasn’t. Not so here.

I can see that perhaps Green’s intention with this novel is less to explore the actual sci-fi elements of a potential space robot invasion, but rather look at the human elements both on a societal and individual level. I think his approach to it didn’t quite work for me, because I found April too… smug and self-involved. I’ll be honest, by the time she started assuming I didn’t know anything about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, she would have struggled to do right by me anyway, and after that passage I found her insufferable and patronising.

I’ve seen other media attempt to do similar things. In another lifetime, I reviewed anime and manga, and Dance in the Vampire Bund did a really great job of dealing with the revelation that vampires were real, the societal implications that had looking at the politics and social aspects both – they’d amassed huge amounts of wealth because they were immortal, they’d attained positions of political power, or had senior figures in business and government in their pockets. But also there were the factions of civilians, pro-vampire and anti-vampire, and the tensions between them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch too much of it because it also decided to use vampire immortality as a way to excuse sexualising what appeared to be a young girl, but the first episode or two was spot on.

Looking at this sort of phenomenon on a personal level, Colossal with Anne Hathaway came out a few years back and seemed to have slipped under most people’s radars, but it is really great. A party girl in denial about being an alcoholic moves back to her home town, but discovers that when she blunders across a playground at a specific time each day after a bender, a giant monster starts rampaging around Seoul on the other side of the world. After a while she realises the monster is her and has to face her personal demons and deal with what this means for her relationships.

For me, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing didn’t set itself apart from these, and it’s tricky to love a book when you loathe the narrator.

Briefly:

Theoretically about a giant space robot, but it might as well just be entitled April May is an Awful Person.
I suppose my issue lies in the fact that the Carls are almost entirely passive through the whole book, because the focus of the plot is April and her life, but… couldn’t we have had that with the Carls doing something? Or a bit more active rather than reactive plot progression?
I say this being unfamiliar with John Green’s work, which I get the impression is very tonally similar to Hank’s – personal stories, accessible literary fiction. If you like John Green, you’ll like this I expect. If you are not into hard SFF, this is probably for you.

Rating: 2/5 – In the long run, you like what you like. This wasn’t for me, but other people might really enjoy it.

I finally read this book and i really enjoyed it. A lot of people didn't like the protagonist but i think that made April May very realistic. She changed her perspective about everything she againts it. I liked the ending and reading Andy's point of view was really good. But i kept waiting to something happened and it didn't so maybe second book will be the action book. Overall it was morecontemporary than sci fi but it was a good read. 3.5/5 stars.

WOAH. If I could give this book a one-word review that would be it. Unfortunately for you, I have A LOT more to say, because An Absolutely Remarkable Thing put my brain through the wringer and I'm not quite sure how to recover.

This is a story about April May, a young woman who discovers a metallic statue in the middle of New York at 3AM. Fascinated by the strange figure, she names it Carl, and she and her friend make a video with it. The next day, she learns that New York Carl is one of 64 Carls that appeared in different cities all across the world, and she was the first to discover them. Caught up in the media's attention, April wants to do something with her platform. However, when the Carls begin sending people mysterious dreams, she gets wrapped in an intense debate about the nature and true intentions of the Carls, and by extension, the nature of humanity. April's desire to control the media narrative leads her to lose any threads of normalcy, causing her relationships and personal identity to crumble in place of the identity she has constructed for herself.

"You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you're pretending to be."

I've heard writers say that you should write the story that only you can tell, and Hank Green does just that. This is a science-fiction novel with a dash of mystery and brilliantly constructed puzzles to decode, but it also has frank discussions about the human species and our relationship with the media. It has been a long time since a book has seriously made me question myself, and I found myself taking a step back from the story at several points just to think and consider my own relationship with the internet and how we place people on pedestals.

An aspect that particularly fascinated me was how individuals cultivate atmospheres of fear and outrage for their personal gain. Even though as the reader we are meant to be on April's side, we see her use these tactics too to get people to listen to her perspective. She allows her life to become so consumed by the attention and support that she is ignorant of the rise of those against her. She discards the views of the "internet trolls" who harass her until their presence in the political landscape is undeniable - an unsettling reminder of the discourse prior to the US 2016 Election. The novel serves as a reminder that just because we surround ourselves with people who agree with our ideals, does not mean other perspectives are non-existent or without impact.

"I inserted myself into this conversation when I didn't really belong there. I was pitching a particular ideology that fit for some people but didn't fit for others. It made perfect sense that a different perspective was going to feel more legitimate to people who were more afraid of otherness."

As a protagonist, April May is not easy to like. She makes mistakes that are inconsiderate, selfish, and downright cruel at times, but that is what makes her feel genuine. By having the events of the story told after the fact, Green shows how April's emotional state led her to make those decisions. She looks back on her past actions and acknowledges that they were "gross" and how they completely disregarded the people in her life who cared about her. She is so desperate to be the sole hero that she utterly destroys her life over it, only to find that isolation is what is preventing her from making real change - a message deeply embedded within the core of the novel. The biggest changes are often ones made when people work together.

I admit that my biggest struggle with this novel was the writing style. It is not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it does move quickly from idea to idea which made me struggle to become invested in the opening chapters. The story also contains a lot of big ideas, but I would have liked those ideas to flow a little better with the narrative. The plot often takes a break to say something important and quote-worthy, which although often meaningful to the story, makes the narrative feel a little bit choppy.

The mystery behind the Carls is by far the most compelling aspect of the novel. Throughout the story, they serve to mirror humanity at it's best and at it's worst. Although An Absolutely Remarkable Thing has a satisfying conclusion regarding hope for the future of the species, it ends on a chilling note that promises much more for the characters. I am already itching for the sequel, and am excited to see how Green continues to use the genre to comment on what it is to be human.



Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All quotes are taken from the final print copy of the novel.


Diversity note: Bisexual protagonist

Warnings: gore, violence, murder, death

I've watched and admired the Green brothers for a while now and I think that is what drew me to the book. But, I didn't get on with the characters and found them unlikeable.