Rating: WARTY!
This was a middle-grade novel about a terminally ill thirteen-year-old who discovers he can receive messages from a dead alien culture. At first he thinks it's just hallucinations, but it becomes more and more persistent and finally he talks his mom into taking him to the SETI institute where it gets confirmed that he's really receiving genuine messages. The people who are studying the transmissions had been unable to understand them until this kid got involved and made sense of them simultaneously making sense of his visions.
It sounded like an interesting and definitely 'off the beaten track' premise, which is what attracted me, but the story was a little bit too juvenile and simplistic for my taste. I gave up on it about halfway through when the kid learned that the aliens had sent a sort of a time-capsule to Earth. The coordinates that the aliens gave were in Columbia, in South America, but the US people went there - with armed soldiers, yet - to pick the thing up apparently without saying a word to the Columbians, leading to a stand-off with the Columbian army.
This was exactly the sort of Trumpian bullshit that's lost the USA a lot of international friends - this sense of self-entitlement and USA über alles. I wasn't exactly brimming with enthusiasm over this story to begin with, but that was far too much to allow: sending troops uninvited was tantamount to a declaration of war and to present this in a children's novel as thought it was perfectly acceptable behavior, and then get aggressive when the locals showed-up and objected, was entirely wrong-headed and seriously poor writing.
This novel could have been written much more wisely than this, and for me it was the last straw. I can't commend this as a worthy read and I'm certainly not about to read a whole series like this. I should have stuck with my instinct which is to reject out of hand any novel that has 'saga' or 'chronicles' anywhere on the cover!
