“An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” by Hank Green

I’ve always been a fan of John Green, especially in my high school years. I loved their YouTube channel, and his books always resonated with me. “Looking for Alaska” was one of my favorite books growing up. But this post isn’t about John Green. It’s about his brother, Hank, and his first novel “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.”

I felt obligated to read this book, like I feel obligated to read all of John Green’s books even though I’m well outside the demographic early high school demographic he writes for . The fact that Hank’s book is about a woman who’s out of college and beginning her adult life sounded promising to me, and it had great reviews. What could go wrong? So many things.

April May (yes, that’s her name) is a young woman living in New York City who stumbles upon a giant transformer-like statue one night that she’d never noticed before. She enlists her friend Andy to make a YouTube video about it with her, and they upload it that night. When they wake up the next morning, they discover the video has gone viral and the statue, which April named “Carl” didn’t just appear in NYC – identical Carls have appeared in every major city in the world.

April and Andy’s video thrusts them into the spotlight and they latch on and take it upon themselves to uncover the mystery behind the Carls. What are they? Where do they come from? What do they want? It’s a Wacky Sci-Fi Adventure with a lot of promise at the beginning. It went downhill fast.

I think I would have liked this book if Green hadn’t tried to hard to make everything feel relevant/trendy/woke. One of the Amazon reviewers took the words right out of my mouth: “This is the least bookish book I’ve ever read in my life. Its prose is shallow, conversational, and trendy. It reads like a Twitter post, but without the 280-character cap.” April May quickly becomes an internet celebrity. She’s a YouTuber, and influencer, she’s on Twitter, she’s got millions of followers, and she’s so god damned annoying. Nothing about her felt real to me, which is saying something, since we’re both 24-ish year old women living in large major cities with creative jobs. She is a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl, she’s a figment of some man’s imagination of what quirky young women should be. April May and I would not be friends.

Another major issue I had with this book was how hard it was trying to Mean Something. Everything was drenched in thinly-veiled symbolism for today’s political climate. You were either Pro-Carl or Anti-Carl, with Pro-Carl characters representing the democratic side of things and Anti-Carls representing the more republican side. Except in the book, one side is clearly good and the other is portrayed as hateful and violent. Honestly, not that far off from reality, but I get enough of that in my day-to-day life. I read fiction to escape it, not to get more of it.

Overall, this book had potential. It could have embraced the silliness of gigantic transformers appearing all over the earth, leaned into it, been silly in a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy kind of way. Instead, the characters were doing too much to be relatable, the plot was all over the place, and the meaning behind it all feels obvious and forced. I’d give this book a solid 2/5, with Andy being the only slightly redeeming character for calling April out on her shit from time to time and being the only real-seeming person in the book. Read at your own risk.