Book Review
Title: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls #1)
Author: Hank Green
Genre: Contemporary/Sci-Fi
Rating: ****
Review: I have seen An Absolutely Remarkable Thing around since it was published and it has received a lot of hype, not all of it good which intrigued me and I wanted to see which side of the fence I fell on. We are introduced to April May, her semi-serious girlfriend, Maya and their friend from college, Andy. The novel opens with April May leaving her job at three in the morning when she sees a mysterious robot in samurai armour on the street and she thinks that it is something interesting and proceeds to walk on but something causes her to return to the robot and knowing Andy is trying to be internet famous she calls him to come and get the scoop on the robot before anyone else. Together she and Andy film a slightly comedic interview with the robot who they call Carl before heading home, however, overnight the video blows up as Carls appeared in almost every major city at the exact same time. In addition to this Andy and April make a lot of money overnight thanks to Andy’s lawyer father and by late afternoon, less than 24 hours later they are being interview on the local news. However, there are people already asking questions about the Carls and where they came from as they are warm to the touch and no surveillance footage shows them appears as they all cut out at the same time and a Queen song can be heard faintly in the background. All this information is interesting but the most interesting thing we learn from April is while she is telling us this story, she is already dead and I can’t wait to find out what happens there.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, things really begin picking up for April and Andy, they earn so much money that April is able to pay off nearly half of her student loan debt in a few weeks which is extraordinary to begin with. However, April has been in contact with a physics student named Miranda as they are interested in the deeper mystery behind what the Carls are. April already knows about the Freddie Mercury Sequence which is related to some strange typos on a Wikipedia page that don’t show up as being logged and always run through the same errors before resetting. Miranda believes that the way April describes the Carl as feeling is literally impossible as nothing, we have on Earth feels or acts in the way April described and therefore the logical and simplest conclusion is that the Carls aren’t from Earth. Miranda also cracks the Freddie Mercury Sequence as she notices the citation numbers changing as well as the typos, Miranda concluded that the I-AM-U message combined with the numbers are pointing to 3 specific elements that are easy to find on Earth and that the Carl is asking for them. She and April agree to meet to go to a store for fire alarms as one of the elements is commonly found in them and the others are easy to find or buy. Back in her every day life, Andy and April decide to construct a brand around April and the fact that the Carls are aliens but they aren’t going to say that they are aliens and when they meet with a very famous agent thanks to Andy’s father, they lay out the facts and what they are planning to do and the agent helps them put the plan into motion which from April we can gather doesn’t work out in the way they planned but we have to see where it goes. During this time April has also distanced herself from Maya as she has been caught up in the media frenzy surrounding the Carls and they are going to capitalize on it.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, the contracts are worked out but it is clear that Andy, April, and Miranda’s lives have changed they just haven’t quite realised it yet. Andy and April draft Miranda to be the logical voice of their videos as she understands the science where they don’t, so the duo becomes a trio and with the assistance of Robin who is now April’s assistant they head out to perform an experiment on the Hollywood Carl. Miranda has got hold of two of the elements that Carl wanted albeit in very small quantities and they are going to see if the robot reacts in any way to them. However, when they arrive, they find a huge line around Carl and April’s fame comes in handy in getting them to the front. April tries the first element and finds that Carl gets warm and makes her lightheaded but it doesn’t for Miranda but after trying the second nothing happens and they decide it is because they can’t get a pure form of the one element because its radioactive and they only had small quantities but then the Carl’s hand falls off and begins running away from them. All three of them begin chasing down the hand while filming but it enters a place called the Magic Castle which they can’t enter because they aren’t members so they have to give up and return to their hotel. On the way back they are all struck by what they are actually doing but we can see fame going to April’s head as she is angry that she wasn’t the first one to realise that all the Carls lost a hand when the Hollywood one did but their hands vanished instead of running away and she has been neglecting Maya and doesn’t even consider talking to her when she is looking for a new place to live and doesn’t want to ask her to move in either. However, that night April experiences the Dream for the first time where she is in a hotel to see Carl and is denied because she doesn’t have the passcode and she wakes up. She doesn’t know it yet but others are experiencing the Dream but they don’t yet understand what it means.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, April and her small team are trying to deal with the fallout of Carl’s hand running away which has brought her even more fame and the Government moving in the control access to the Carls but April is lucky that her new apartment literally looks down on the New York Carl. April also breaks up with Maya which hurts her more than she admits but she finds it necessary in that moment as she doesn’t have room in her life for anything else except the Carls. As the team learn that they have all experienced the Dream and what that could mean in the grand scheme of things, April gets a call from the actual President of the United States, who informs April that she should have got hold of her and passes the information about the Carls along. More people have been dragged into the Carls orbit as well as people have figured out that there are multiple puzzles in the Dream that give passcodes which Miranda believes are hex codes which can be inputted into a computer to build a programme or give more information which has obviously come from the Carls. However, during this time another person rises up to oppose April’s ideology that the Carls are harmless, Peter Petrawicki believes that the Carls have the potential to be dangerous and that something needs to be done about them which becomes clear when he is on a panel with April discussing the Carls. Peter becomes a rival to April and rather that just be a passive participant to the Carls as she has been, Peter forces her to take a more active role in defending the Carls and learning everything she can quicker than him in order to stay ahead of him which is petty but we have seen that April is a pretty petty person throughout the novel so far.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, we follow April as her fame continues to grow and she slowly loses the ability to tell the difference between the persona she has created and who she really is making them seem like the same person. The pacing also changes her as for the first half of the book encompasses the first three weeks after the arrivals of the Carls and them in a small portion of the novel, we cover months where we see April really struggling. April is struggling with loneliness as she has never truly been on her own causing her to make some bad decisions like sleeping with Miranda who Andy has a crush on which makes things awkward between them. She constantly fights with Peter only escalating the discourse between the Carl supporters and the Defenders which directly leads to extremist members of the Defenders trying to bomb multiple Carls killing hundreds of people and injuring hundreds more and on top of all this April’s fame is only growing. However, things have changes as the Carls have singled her out as the plane, she sees in the Dream no one else sees which means it is a puzzle just for her and the hex code she will get is the final piece of the puzzle in order to figure out what the Carls want once and for all. However, even after months of trying April hasn’t been able to solve the puzzle not even with the help of Maya and the Dreamers who have solved almost every other puzzle given to them. The Carls have singled her out further as the Defenders come to attack April and possibly try to kill her when she is shoved out of the way and she believes there is person in her apartment but when she goes looking for the person, she finds New York Carl’s missing hand from way back near the beginning of the novel and I am honestly confused by this but I am hoping it will become clear soon.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, April finds out she can communicate with the hand in a way and she feels safe with it, even after she falls asleep wrapped around it, she wakes to find her emails answered and she knows that the hand did it but she doesn’t say anything about it because the hand didn’t want her too. The next day her and Andy plan to record a video outside her building surrounded by her fans and a man stabs her in the back and attempts to kill her and it turns out to be the same man that tried to shoot her but she doesn’t find this out until later. April hides the footage to begin with as the police and FBI are after but turns a copy over to the President after she asks for it because she tells April that the Carl turns her would be killer into grape jelly and killed him. She also explains due to their laws they are going to be bring a criminal case against the Carl but it will most likely be ruled as justifiable homicide as there is clear evidence that the Carl acted to protect her. However, this leaves April in a difficult position as she confesses to the President that her dream is different and is possibly the key to what the Carls want with humanity. She realises around this point that the Carl protected her because she is important to them in some way but either way it leaves her with a target painted on her back as on the one hand, she is important to them and they will save humanity which paints her as a Messiah, and on the other hand, she is important to them because they intend to destroy humanity which makes her a traitor to her species but the only way for her to find out is to solve the riddle of her Dream once and for all. At this point in the novel, the stakes have moved beyond fame and notoriety as lives are on the line and April is the one that hold all the keys to solving the mystery surrounding the Carls.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, I really didn’t want to say much about the ending of this book given that the mystery which the whole novel is built around comes to a close and not in the way you are expecting at all. I have to say the ending literally gave me chills and made me want to dive into the sequel straight away because it literally turned everything on its head and I have no idea where the story is going to go only that April is now more important than ever and her story will be bound to the Carls for the rest of time but to see that play out you definitely have to read the sequel. I will admit that a lot of the reviews were correct in saying April wasn’t a great protagonist and you realise by the ending she wasn’t meant to be likeable or interesting or even nice, she was simply meant to be human and to be human is to make mistake and have to deal with the consequences of them which April did but the novel also makes you consider how your actions after the lives of the people closest to you, the people around you and even people on the other side of the world. For a first contact story, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing was definitely interesting and gripping and I can’t recommend it enough.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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