Which wasn’t that hard to do, because frankly I thought it was going to be total crap. Years ago I saw a snarky review which basically portrayed it as “Twilight with aliens” and I was about to take it off my tbr when I was clearing it up recently… but it was reduced on kindle, so I read it instead (which actually is one way to reduce your tbr 😉 ) Luckily, I ended up being pleasantly surprised. Don’t get your hopes up and expect a full on gush– it’s not the best book in the universe- just mildly entertaining.
Katy’s voice is pretty spunky and I found her blogging relatable- I’m all for bloggers as you know 😉 . Though not everything she did was super #relatable– and I’m not just talking about her green thumb (which I definitely don’t have). In a concerted effort to make her seem all grown up and mature, there was a long scene where she went to the grocery store… why?!?! Why do books do this?! I mean, my mum sent me out to the shops when I was ten (very good trick if you have a shy child that needs pushing out their comfort zone 😉 )- mundane life skills are not in *any way* impressive!! So yeah I wasn’t enamoured by that, but the massive downside to her character is that she’s a “plain Jane”– aka a good looking character that thinks she’s ugly and thus spends wayyy too much time comparing herself every other women she encounters. Ye gods that level of low self-esteem is annoying! And of course she has a weird way of dealing with it…
“Who knew the kind of girls he was used to seeing in bathing suits”- Ummm the regular kind- just because he’s good looking doesn’t mean he will only have seen super fit people. But don’t worry, she has a plan…
“That was the whole purpose of the red bathing suit. I wanted to prove to him I wasn’t easily intimidated”- hahaha sure. You show him by wearing the sexiest bikini you have 😉
The romance is… questionable. Daemon, the love interest, says plenty of dodgy stuff, comes across as more rude than endearing, and walks around topless, because why not? A lot of their initial conversations are super cringey as well. BUT it’s very clear that she’s into him (though I’ve no idea why) and it’s kind of a mixture of lust and hate-to-love rather than being instalove– hence it didn’t get on my nerves. Plus, he has a solid supernatural reason for keeping her at arm’s length, so it’s kinda fair enough. That said, there were still a fair number of Twilight-esque moments, which kept me from ever fully enjoying it.
“A stranger approaches you for help in a dark parking lot and you go and help him? That has to be one of the most careless things I’ve heard in a long time”– Oh look it’s Edward and Bella 2.0
“This crazy but I’m not scared of you.”– hahahaha Twilight 2.0
Yes, alien boy gets weirdly overprotective, though in fairness to him, she does go off to help grown men change their tyres in the middle of the night- Bella Swan wasn’t that stupid. Plus it has a lot of typical tropes:
Tragic backstory – check! 
A hip mother who wants her teenage daughter to get into more trouble- check!
A showdown at a school dance- double check!
“I also knew there was something not normal about him. About all of them.”– no shit Sherlock
Yet for all that it was deliciously corny. I think now that I look back on some of the criticisms levied at the book, calling it “problematic” and whatnot, are taking the book a bit too seriously- which is quite the mistake considering this book doesn’t take itself too seriously. The author has deliberately littered the text with loads of little jokes that are basically “look he’s an alien!” and it this humour that saves this. All the references to Men in Black and ET and other tentacley goodness tickled my fancy. To my mind it’s not a bad book, it’s just endlessly silly and I got a good chuckle out of it.
“As you can see, I don’t look like a giant insect”- well thank goodness for that
Rating: 3/5 bananas
So have you read it? Love it or hate it? Somewhere in between? Let me know in the comments!
the orang-utan librarian 