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[Copy provided by publisher]

READ IF YOU LIKE...
� Contact with extraterrestrials
� Grappling with all of today's problems
� Unconventional storytelling

I THOUGHT IT WAS...
An interesting but perhaps overly convoluted exploration into whether humanity deserves to be saved. It's the first day of 2012 when scientists reveal that we've received a message from another planet. The world is rocked by a sudden drive to fix all that's broken. Meanwhile, Sevi and Ramona, a couple in their 30s who recently broke up, also attempt to mend their relationship. At the same time, Eason, a Black kid in Chicago, grapples with the senseless death of a childhood friend.

And these are just a few of the storylines that unravel over the course of this complicated novel. I like what Soto sought to do with the construction of it, and I think he was more or less successful, but some of the details were just a little too abstract, a little too intellectually obfuscating. Eason's storyline, about an aspiring cellist pulled into drug dealing by his cousin, felt out of place even though I liked his character. Again, I think I understood it's purpose, but I don't think it was unnecessary to get the desired point across.

I kept thinking about THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM while reading this book. Both are about us discovering proof of alien life and how that knowledge changes us. While Liu explores it from a macro-level, Soto approaches it from a micro-level, considering whether it would make us, as individuals, care about social issues more or less than we do now. Soto gave a lot of nuance to this, which I liked. I just think it could have been conveyed more cleanly.