Seanan McGuire is an incredibly prolific writer – I tend to prefer the things she publishes under Seanan McGuire but I still check out her Mira Grant work. Under that pen name, I like her Newsflesh series (zombies) and her mermaid novellas most.
This novel is my least favorite thing I have ever read by Seanan McGuire. I wasn’t sure about the premise even going in but I figured Grant/McGuire would have an interesting take. It started strong, beginning with the horror of a little girl’s death and then moving 30 years into the future, where Anastasia Miller works at a call center in Seattle, living with two roommates and in a long term relationship with Graham. They all accept her quirk where she claims that she is part of the vanguard of an invading alien species. Except … then an alien signal is released and Stasia’s delusion feels a lot more relevant.
Stasia was just such a boring (frustrating?) narrator for me – I can’t even quite put my finger on it. We are getting her internal monologue and how the exposure to the signal has triggered her to change, how it is impacting her brain chemistry and thoughts, and I just don’t care that much. It all went too long or felt tedious? Not sure if this story would have been better as a novella or from multiple perspectives but it was just too long and repetitive.
The best parts were when we learned about Stasia’s friends – McGuire is so great at quickly humanizing characters but she did all the emotional work she usually does and then it felt like it all dropped and didn’t matter after the first third. It could have been interesting to hear more from them and how they were dealing with their friendship and loyalty to Stasia put them in a position where they were considered traitors to their species.
Usually, I’ll read something new by McGuire within a day but this one took me a few days – I even put it down and read something else before coming back to it. I think partially, in addition to the flaws above, it just felt like it was going in a dark and depressing direction, and the story wasn’t engaging me enough to make it worth it.