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Late one night in small-town Splendor, Ohio, a mysterious object falls from the sky right in front of a group of teenagers. They would write it off as just a piece of a meteor, but when they come in contact with it and wake up in the morning having lost about six hours of memory, they are deeply rattled and confused and unsure what to think.
Franny and her friends probably wouldn’t have been friends had it not been for their shared experiences of losing family members in the tragic explosion of the local steel mill five years earlier. Over the intervening years, they have tacitly agreed not to talk about their losses and related serious matters; instead, they focus on filming rather dumb videos of their manufactured experiences investigating ghost stories and legends in and around Splendor. Their YouTube channel “The Ordinary” just gets a handful of views, but it’s fun. When they end up with video of the object falling and post it, though, the number of viewers skyrockets. And they get more attention than they bargained for. Not only that, they find they have some unusual abilities.
This book could easily be taken for simply a UFO story; it has all the elements, with teens riding around on bikes and trying to figure out whom to trust, trying to evade mysterious people who might be using the kids for nefarious purposes, etc. However, if you’ve read Emily Henry’s other books, as I have (and I LOVED them), you’ll suspect that there might be a bit more to the story than what’s at face value. Henry has a way of writing that explores people and their connections with each other, love and loss, and that is beautifully poignant. I don’t think this was my favorite of her novels so far, but I appreciated it nonetheless. Keep on writing, Ms. Henry!
Rated: High.There are right around 7 uses of strong language and more instances of moderate and mild language. Teens in the book sometimes use some coarse references in their banter with each other. Sexual content is limited to some of that vulgarity in conversation and brief kissing. Violence is fairly minimal; there is mostly just tension and peril.
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