Its hard to understand what the author intended this book to be. Although the story revolves around aliens and flying saucers, Its not really a science fiction story. The best I can come up with is that its a satire of modern life set against a backdrop of aliens from outer space. ( )

When it comes to novels that are first and foremost billed as entertainment, I have a long history of setting myself up for disappointment, as I tend to be hyper-critical; not to mention that good comedy timing is hard! Therefore, I'm pleased to report that this novel actually works very well, as Jane has secrets to reveal that she does so with a good sense of pacing, while intermixed with a lot of absurdity and characters dealing with a large load of anomie.The arrival of space aliens is the least of some these characters' problems. As to whether this counts as science fiction, well, it's not that far removed from one of John Scalzi's para-contemporary novels, or Genevieve Valentine's "Space Opera," to use a couple of contemporary examples that no one questions as being science fiction; it's all just marketing after all. ( )

2023 book #55. 2023. Giant alien spaceships appear over major Earth cities then suddenly leave without even saying hi. The book follows some ordinary seeming people (and a few cats) as they react to this event. Pretty funny and well written. More of a satire than heavy SciFi. ( )

I feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch scam. I was told we would investigate "big questions" about "what does it mean that we're not alone" and "what it means to be alive in the twenty-first century". This is certainly promised by the back cover blurb and implied by the vaguely Scripture reference in the title. I would be all over such a story.
But that story is barely alluded to in the first half of the book and humorously dismissed by the latter half.

To kick things off we're driving through a snowstorm with politely bickering siblings who have no business being out in such a storm and aren't very good company for anybody. No aliens. No spaceships. No humor.

Skip forward twenty years. Giant alien spaceships appear over major cities for a while and then disappear without making contact or seeming to do anything. Get ready for the big questions - not. The energy of the book goes into examining the mundane. A rocky marriage with bratty children. A girl with a bad boyfriend and odd stepfather. A survivalist who might make things happen, just disappears instead. There should be more clues that the odd behavior could be related to the alien visitors, rather than just odd people acting oddly. Everyone just comes off as confused, including the reader.

Then there are the cats. About the time we start getting revelations (hint: there are aliens among us), the cats start acting oddly, too. We even get a few scenes from a cat viewpoint. And then we don't. We just see the cats from the human point of view. At least things are happening in the last half of the book and the pace picks up. There seems to be a plan, even if the reader doesn't understand it any better than the characters. If I had not committed to writing a review of this book, there's a good chance I would have set it down before things got more interesting and marked it DNF. But I did stick with it and enjoyed some of the absurdity and alien life conjectures of the second half.

With a more conventional story presentation and compelling questions in the first chapters, I might have given this book at least 4 stars. But the rambling paragraphs, jumbled structure, barely sympathetic characters, dangling plot lines and wrap-it-up-in-a-bow ending force me to knock off at least a star. I think the author was going for Close Encounters of the Third Kind crossed with Third Rock from the Sun with some cat-lady spice. But I don't think she pulled it off.

Disclosure: Thank you to Netgalley and Hyperion Avenue for providing a free copy of this book in return for my honest review. ( )

A sometimes maudlin, mostly lighthearted and humorous story that starts with a sad, deadly car crash but ends up being about extraterrestrials, familial love, and uncertainty and ennui in the face of global upheaval (wherever could that have originated?!). Kind of a Douglas Adams vibe—humanity is not alone in the universe, but what is out there is just as ridiculous as we are. ( )