An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green tells the story of April May, an aspiring graphic designer living her struggling artist lifestyle in New York City when she stumbles upon a giant robot sculpture and puts together a video about it to share on YouTube. April becomes a celebrity when it turns out that there's more than one giant robot (16 across the world, to be exact) and she has a certain connection to it.  With the help of her friends, April navigates her newfound fame while trying to unravel the mysteries that the giant sculptures bring into her life.

There comes a certain point in your life when you have to just say: this isn't for me. And, I'm sorry, but the Green brothers are not for me. This whole novel fell flat for me, but it has more than 4 stars on Goodreads and some of my Goodreads friends who I really trust gave it 5 stars, so I am definitely in the minority on this one. Here's the deal. It's just not interesting enough.

There's an integration of social media in the novel that seems like it would be in Hank Green's wheelhouse, he of the incredible YouTube fame. And I guess I'm just of a generation who just doesn't get it?  Like, who's checking Twitter and YouTube for news (I guess most young people)?  Who sits down and plans how to brand themselves (I guess most young people)?  I'm here clicking away at my old skool weblog and find the whole premise of April's celebrity ridiculous. 

I wanted more of the puzzles and it really bothered me that we were rarely given enough information to solve the puzzles. If the puzzles were going to be impossible to solve without additional information, the actual answers could have been more exciting (like in Ready Player One, which many people criticize, but I think is a real plot machine of a novel).

The characters could have had backstory and been interesting, perhaps. April's "Iowa farm girl from a loving family" shtick was trite and unbelievable, frankly.  She has a complicated sexual identity and suffered no ill effects from it?  As for the rest of the characters, Green describes them physically over and over again without actually telling us anything about them. 

The ending could have actually resolved something instead of being a clear beginning to yet another book.  I honestly think the book would have been stronger if the last chapter had been omitted entirely and that would have been a good beginning to the second book, but maybe I'm just really into the idea of ruthlessly editing out the unnecessary elements of a novel after having just read On Writing. No, I actually think Green's editors did him a wrong here by allowing the last chapter to remain.

So, here's the deal. Maybe this book will be for you - many readers I trust deeply love it! - but it was absolutely not the book for me.