She noticed a pattern happening, but she didn’t solve it – instead she got someone else to do it. 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. 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. 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. 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. This seems a shame, because it’s a book about giant space robots, and SFF fans LOVE giant space robots. 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. Hank Green’s first book came out last year. They were a cultural touchpoint that I could understand references to, but nothing more. I had never actively sought out either of them, although nor had I actively avoided them either. 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. Now April has to deal with the pressure on her relationships, her identity and her safety that this new position brings, all while being on the front lines of the quest to find out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us. There are Carls in dozens of cities around the world – everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires – and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the centre of an international media spotlight. The next day April wakes up to a viral video and a new life.

Delighted by its appearance – like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armour – April and her friend Andy make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. While roaming the streets of New York City at 3 a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture she calls Carl. OR DO THE ONE THING THAT WOULD CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER? IF YOU CAME ACROSS AN ABSOLUTELY REMARKABLE THING Genre: Science Fiction, YA, coming-of-age

An absolutely remarkable thing 2