Books Not Decaf

Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.

Only he isn’t sure he wants to.

After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.

Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.

But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.

This was a random grab from the second-hand section at a local bookstore. Zero expectation, no sense of emergency in getting to it anytime soon, not really even a flicker of feeling past ‘huh, I like the cover’. But then I found it while looking through Libby for my next audiobook, so to the front of the TBR list it went.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It presents the questions of “what’s the point of living?” and “how do you live after tragedy?” with a twist – in much the same way horror media uses monstrous elements as analogies for mental health. The book was less about aliens and more about coping in the aftermath of suicide, choosing yourself for the sake of you, and (broken) family, while still utilizing the sci-fi genre to elevate the storytelling.

It also – and, maybe, most importantly – stands to remind us that it is okay not to always be the strong one. Tell someone when you are not okay.

Rating: 4/5