I missed this book in my recent extreme review catch up. I was laying in bed last night thinking “what about that alien girl book?” because I didn’t remember writing about it. Anyway, here we are.
Our main character is Joanna, a bird researcher who’s recovering from losing her mother and some of her womanhood after surviving breast cancer. She’s staying at a cabin and doing research on nests for the summer, and kinda hiding from the rest of the world. Then randomly one day a little girl shows up. She’s bruised, dirty, and barefoot. She tells Joanna her name is Ursa and she’s visiting planet Earth to do some research of her own and witness five miracles.
Now this is not a science fiction book, so I knew at the beginning that she wasn’t an alien. Throughout the book though, she’s very convincing. She’s extremely smart, intuitive, amazing at hiding, and sticks with her alien story like glue. I realllly wanted to believe that she was from another planet, because the alternative couldn’t be good. Why was nobody looking for this little girl? Joanna tried for weeks to figure out where she came from, but every time she involved the cops, Ursa ran away.
This is a beautiful story of Joanna trying to find herself and heal herself through love. She brings a few other people along on the journey with her. There are so many elements that I loved about this book: science, learning, the forest, being kind to people, love… Four stars.
