The True Meaning of Smekday
The Smek Smeries series, Book 1
Adam Rex
Disney-Hyperion
Fiction, MG Humor/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Gratuity "Tip" Tucci needs to write an essay for a school contest about Smekday, the day the alien Boov first came to Earth... but there's more to write than five pages can possibly hold, and more to say than she wants to reveal.
She was eleven when the Boov arrived, and she knew they were trouble before anyone else, as the first thing they did was abduct her mother. Then they relocated the entire population of America to Florida, claiming the rest for themselves... but Tip doesn't trust their rocket ships, opting instead to drive herself and her pet cat Pig from Pennsylvania. (It's okay - she had to teach herself to drive a while ago, as her flighty mother couldn't always be trusted to run errands, and she only had that one mishap on a sidewalk.) When she reluctantly picks up a mechanic Boov who calls himself J.Lo (and who modifies her hatchback for hoverflight), what started as a simple road trip becomes a cross-country quest to find her mother and save the world - not from the Boov, but from the monstrous aliens who followed the Boov to Smekland (formerly Earth.)
REVIEW: This award-winning title still gets decent circulation at the library where I work, so I figured it was worth a read (or a listen; this is the first audiobook I've reviewed.) From the title and cover blurb, I expected something lightweight, silly even. What I got certainly had plenty of silliness, but with a tooth underneath that occasionally reminded me of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, only geared for a younger audience. The Boov have bubble-based writing and some outwardly ridiculous trappings, but their history mirrors humanity in some sobering ways, and not just their tendency to treat the "noble savage" humans as inferior entities to be swept away into the corner of lands that now "rightfully" belong to them; to paraphrase Tip, the Boov are too smart and too stupid to be anything but regular people like humans. Tip is a resourceful girl - she's had to be, with a mother prone to blowing savings on vacuums or forgetting to buy food - but she has her limits, and is pushed to them more than once on a trying road trip with her alien companion... an alien she initially hates, for what his kind did to her mother and her species, but whom she slowly comes to understand. She also has to come to understand the strengths and weaknesses of other people she encounters, from a group of "lost boys" hiding in an abandoned theme park to self-deluded UFOlogists camped out in Roswell. Several lines had me snickering out loud as I listened, though the silliness (almost) never overstayed its welcome, and there were some moments of gut-sluggingly deep emotion. Aside from an occasional sense of meandering and Tip taking a little too long to figure out one element leading to the climax, I enjoyed the ride, not to mention the audio presentation (by Bahni Turpin.)
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