I heard about this book at Comic Con (or Book Con, I can’t remember.) It’s the story of a middle school girl, Erin Song, who loses her technology privileges and can suddenly see aliens! Erin is not the most popular kid in school, so when the popular girl in her class asks her to help her cheat on a quiz, Erin agrees. But then she gets caught, and her parents take away all of her screen time – phone, laptop, tablet, tv, and video games. Almost immediately, Erin can see little fuzzy aliens in the street. (This seems to happen far too quickly, in my opinion. The effects of screens should have taken a bit longer to wear off.) The only problem is that no one else seems to be able to see the aliens, no one else except two elderly librarians. The aliens are controlling everyone through screens, and they’re abducting people and erasing them from everyone’s memories. So Erin and the old folks come up with a plan to get rid of the aliens.
There are plot holes aplenty in this. The aliens are supposed to be erasing memories about the people they abduct, but when Erin’s grandma gets taken, her parents and friend still remember her existence, but think that she had died four years ago. They remember the funeral, they say. And a few days after her grandma is taken, her retirement home has become an electronics super store? That doesn’t really make sense. Why would one person missing change history? What about the other people in the retirement home? And another member of Erin’s family is missing, but her parents don’t acknowledge their existence at all, even if physical reminders are still present. They do cover the difficulties Erin has in school of avoiding screens, though, so I appreciate that. (Although why she didn’t just say she had a concussion and can’t look at screens is beyond me. That happens constantly in the middle and high schools around here!)
This is a juvenile graphic novel and it’s entertaining, but the inconsistencies did distract me from total enjoyment. Would a kid notice these holes? Maybe, maybe not. Will adults? Probably. But not everything needs to be a grand work of art!
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