When the Sky Fell on Splendor (Emily Henry)

When the Sky Fell on Splendor
Emily Henry
Razorbill
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Five years ago, the small town of Splendor, Ohio was rocked by an explosion at the steel mill, and nothing has been the same since, even for those who didn't lose someone in the blast. Out of the ashes, a tentative new friendship was forged among six teens (and one aging dog), who call themselves the Ordinary. They spend their free time making mockumentary videos for the internet, which hasn't exactly garnered them the fame and fortune they might hope for but at least keeps them from feeling too smothered by small town life. If only they could capture something unique, something attention-getting... something real.
One night, shooting a faux "haunting" video at the abandoned Jenkins house, Frannie and her companions see what they take to be meteors streaking across the sky, until something crashes into the nearby power substation. They go to investigate - and somehow lose six hours of their life, with nothing but a vague memory of intense light and a sound that might be voices or music or something else altogether. What footage their camera managed to capture only deepens the mystery... and when strange things start occurring around them and around Splendor, they realize it's not just their imaginations. Something very extraordinary happened to the Ordinary that night, and if they can't figure out what soon, then they and the entire town might be in grave danger.

REVIEW: The premise had promise, and it started out decent enough as it established its characters and the desperation of their existence in modern middle-of-nowhere Ohio. Narrator Frannie struggles to cope with the lingering scars of the steel mill blast, a blast that left her oldest brother Mark in a coma and forever changed her relationship with her brother Albert and father (not to mention the mother who left them when she couldn't cope). With the Ordinary, for all that none of them speak openly of their griefs and troubles, she at least knows she isn't alone in the world, even if she can't see much of a future for herself or more than one of her friends. Goofing around in internet videos is as close to cutting loose as she can manage - until the thing falls from the sky, of course, shattering even that fragile peace the teens have managed to cobble together between them.
And here is where things start to wobble, as Frannie is shown to be rather clueless and in denial about obvious things, not to mention how it becomes increasingly clear that she doesn't ever actually do anything (save suffer and generally be confused) without being pushed... and even then it takes multiple shoves. She even ends up with a hurt ankle, evidently because we haven't yet consigned that cliche to the garbage heap where it belongs. The rest of the Ordinary try, with varying degrees of success, to cope in their own ways, choosing everything from pretending nothing happened to deep dives into conspiracy theories to wondering how to take advantage of finally having something the world might notice on video, but it's a bit difficult to connect with them through the lens of Frannie.
There is some decent tension as their video goes viral and brings the wrong kind of attention, but at some point it starts feeling less like genuine danger and more like a cheap knock-off of The X-Files without the character chemistry or tight plotting... more like in the later seasons when it's clear the writers no longer have a clear and unified vision of what the Truth actually is and are just winging it from episode to episode. The teens degrade from reasonably believable characters caught in a situation far beyond their experience to people who would be outsmarted and outinvestigated by the Scooby Doo gang. And then, at the climax (which had gone from tense to almost laughably ridiculous already), there is a hard right turn that almost literally had me groaning and rolling my eyes in utter incredulity, completely shattering any lingering traces of my suspension of disbelief. I will not elaborate to avoid spoilers, but it completely changes the entire premise of the book from teen sci-fi thriller to something else entirely, making me feel cheated.
On top of that, the audiobook was irritating, as the narrator often dipped into mumbles and whispers that made me crank up the volume to hear over ambient noise at work, only to hurt my ears when returning to a normal voice. I don't like being in pain, but maybe that's just me. By the end, I just wished that whatever fell on Splendor had done a more thorough job and taken out the whole town.

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