Before we begin, I want to start by saying all book reviews on this blog will be as spoiler-free as possible. I’m writing a review, not a summary, so feel free to read this review if you haven’t yet read the books. Here we go!
Within the last few weeks I’ve read both An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green. As of writing this, I actually finished the latter novel just last night. We make quick work of book reviews here at thelitwiz.
There are a few things I want to talk about regarding these books, the first being they are very obviously written by Hank Green. If you’ve ever seen a vlogbrothers video or watched Hank Green’s personal Youtube channel, you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not sure if his Youtube persona extends to real life as I’ve never met him (obviously), but it clearly extends to his writing. This is not a bad thing.
Hank Green is a person who has a lot of ideas. I’ve been a regular viewer of both of his channels for years and I would say most of his videos act as a frenzied information dump, but in a very positive way. They’re extremely educational and they have a way of making you feel better about the world even when the world is at its lowest, which seems like all the time these days. His books mirror this entirely.
Sometimes people write characters as characters, and sometimes people write characters as vessels through which to explore their own ideas. I think all authors indulge in the latter method, but if done unskillfully it can come across as preachy or as having an obvious agenda. I wouldn’t describe Hank Green as preachy, but he is a little bit guilty of having an agenda. The books act as part story, part social commentary, and part examination of humanity. It’s an interesting trifecta but the commentaries often pull the reader out of the story and into Green’s own thoughts, which is why I marked him guilty on the charge of having an agenda.
However, the agenda seems to be encouraging us to work together to lessen “world suck”, so I’ll give him a pass. Besides, having an agenda is nothing new. Jane Austen’s novels are teeming social commentary and we love her for it, but I digress.
Because this book IS Hank Green, most of the characters sound very similar. The main character, April, is the most developed and most pronounced. Everyone else ends up sounding like her, especially when it comes to the long-winded explanations of how things work. This didn’t bother me too much because at other points of the novels the supporting characters, Maya, Andy, Miranda, and Robin, have distinctly different takes on the world around them.
The first book is entirely from April’s point of view, so the aforementioned problem above isn’t present, but the second novel switches points of view between characters fairly frequently, and that’s where we see the issue of mind-melding. As for the writing, I would say there is a perceptible difference in skill between the first and second novels, which is to be expected since Green is a new author. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing contains the word “like”, like, too many times. As I said, it’s written from April’s point of view, so it’s written how she would speak, but we also don’t often write how we speak in real life. If we did, this review would be, like, so annoying.
A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor feels more refined and also uses significantly less expletives. This could either be attributed to the refinement of the novel, or to the fact that April is no longer our only narrator. Her friends just might not curse as much as she does, but I find I appreciated the cursing. It was fun and separated the novels from the usual PG-13 atmosphere. What the second novel lacks in adult language, it makes up for in descriptions of violence, which are also not very PG-13. These are adult books with adult themes and should be regarded as such, though your average teenager has definitely been exposed to worse things than are in Green’s novels.
Also, a quick note here about the supporting characters: they’re a pretty diverse bunch. I don’t want to draw too much attention to that because, while diversity should be celebrated, it should also be the norm by now. Still, it deserves a brief mention because it was nice to see.
Now, for the plot. It’s great. An alien organism shows up to earth and people immediately start vlogging it. To be fair, they didn’t know it was alien at first, but even after they found out, they still kept taking videos of it. That’s probably the most accurate portrayal of what would happen if we found real-life aliens. There’s not too much I can say about this without spoiling the book, but Green’s idea is original and I enjoyed his interpretation of our reaction to finding alien life immensely. He analyzes both our need for attention and our reaction to the foreign through this one, life-altering event.
Green’s novel is a dive into how fame affects us mentally and emotionally, and how it can affect our relationships. April and Andy explore sudden fame in different ways, Maya and Miranda are our internal and external perceptions of watchin people grow famous, and Robin is a look into the two-sidedness of fame. Their reactions to the situations they’re put in feel genuine and because of that they’re sometimes quite ugly which I think is beautiful.
Overall, they’re good books. I’m very impressed with Hank Green’s first novels and I hope he writes more. In the meantime, you all should read these ones.
The Lit Wiz