An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

 

This is a novel that I saw sitting on the library shelves, and I picked it up and put it back on a fw trips. Then I saw that Green blurbed some book I really enjoyed--I don't remember which--and it kinda worked backward to how blurbs are supposed to work, in that it led me to finally go ahead and read this book. I have the sense it got some buzz--clearly Green was someone sorta in the public eye before publishing this--but I knew nothing other than what was on the cover. It's an interesting, pretty good book. Green has things to say about celebrity and the internet (especially social media) and how they interact, and about how tribes form and conflict with each other online; some of those things look a little ... dated to me, looking back on this book published in 2018, but maybe I've just been paying attention mostly in the wrong places or to the wrong people. The story is reasonably OK, the narrator comes off badly enough that she doesn't seem really unreliable; there's clearly something of an unresolved ending, though the main does get to be something of a Messiah. There are things that are probably not super-plausible, especially in the science, plausibly in some of the professional ethics; I'm not an expert in the relevant areas but something seems off. The prose is bright and catchy and laden with nifty turns of phrase. There is, I gather, something of a sequel to this, and I'll probably grab that on some future library run and read it.