Review: It Came From the Sky by Chelsea Sedoti

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

It Came From the Sky by Chelsea Sedoti
Published by Sourcebooks Fire on August 4, 2020
Genres: YA Contemporary
Pages: 512
Source: the publisher
Format: ARC
My Rating:
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Synopsis:

From the author of The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett and As You Wish comes the unforgettable story of the one small town’s biggest hoax and the two brothers who started it all.

This is the absolutely true account of how Lansburg, Pennsylvania was invaded by aliens and the weeks of chaos that followed. There were sightings of UFOs, close encounters, and even abductions. There were believers, Truth Seekers, and, above all, people who looked to the sky and hoped for more.

Only…there were no aliens.

Gideon Hofstadt knows what really happened. When one of his science experiments went wrong, he and his older brother blamed the resulting explosion on extraterrestrial activity. And their lie was not only believed by their town―it was embraced. As the brothers go to increasingly greater lengths to keep up the ruse and avoid getting caught, the hoax flourishes. But Gideon’s obsession with their tale threatened his whole world. Can he find a way to banish the aliens before Lansburg, and his life, are changed forever?

Told in a report format and comprised of interviews, blog posts, text conversations, found documents, and so much more, It Came from the Sky is a hysterical and resonant novel about what it means to be human in the face of the unknown.

My Review:

Wow this was a REALLY long book. I did enjoy it, when I picked it up it was something that I just kept turning the pages as I read to get through the story, and see how it would all turn out. Honestly, there was a lot in this book. Not only did we have just your regular story parts, there were pages of the extra documentation that you find in a lot of books now. Interview transcripts, website posts with their comments, text conversations, and even little interludes where our main narrator gave us kind of extra thoughts or expansions of the thoughts we got within the story parts.

I am a huge fan of the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, and so there were a lot of things in here that totally connected to that. First, our main character Gideon, is totally a Sheldon type of character. Except for he is more like the actor who plays Sheldon in that he is gay. And then, Gideon’s last name is Hofstadt, which is part of the character Leonard on TBBT’s last name, Hofstadter.

There were a lot of different things going on the story thought besides just the UFO hoax that Gideon was working on. There was his younger sister and her sudden obsession with cults. There was his father not being happy with what he’d been doing the last so many years of basically being a stay-at-home dad. His mother’s myTality business and the crazy leader of that group. Gideon’s best friends at school, learning to trust the new member of his group. Gideon worrying about having a relationship with Owen, the only other openly gay boy in the town. Wanting to get into his first choice school, M.I.T., but other things in his life dragging him down from being the valedictorian. So yeah, pretty much what a teenager feels like their life is.

It was a good story, just maybe a bit overlong, I can see some things that didn’t necessarily need as much time as they got, but that’s just my opinion. Nothing was not a part of the story, nothing didn’t fit. All in all a really good contemporary story since as we’re told from the synopsis, it is just a hoax.