I thought a lot about how I wanted to critique this book, because sometimes I think I’m being too harsh. And sometimes I also think I’m being too generous, and I don’t want to hand out five star ratings to just anything because then does it diminish the worthiness of five star ratings? If everything is a five star book, is anything a five star book? Perhaps that’s too philosophical for what I’m trying to say, and I’m sure anyone who has ever read one of my reviews and mumbled “wow, harsh,” (or worse things) under their breath hasn’t grappled at all with the idea that I’m being too generous and YET…
I still struggled with how to talk about this one.
But I finally came to a conclusion about what my real issue was here, and the answer might surprise you.
But first and foremost—the preliminaries. Thank you very much again to Penguin Teen for sending me the eARC of this book. I appreciate it, as always.
The basics: Skywatchers is a YA novel by Carrie Arcos about a group of teens living on the West Coast in the year 1952, at the height of Cold War tensions. The teens are a part of a group mobilized by President Truman called Operation Skywatch or the Civilian Ground Observer Corps, in which civilians take rotations–you guessed it–watching the sky for possible incoming threats from the country’s Russian enemies. They are trained in what to look for and reporting procedures and provided with a line to an operator where they call in any sightings of anything in the U.S. airspace. (This is a totally real thing that actually happened, and real life Skywatchers ranged anywhere in age from 8 to 80. If you want to know more about this, and about the rise of UFO sightings around the time of The Cold War and how that led to aliens invading pop culture, click here to check out the post before this one, a whole Spooky Saturday that goes more in-depth into the situation.)
One night while on post watching the sky, the group sees a strange color-changing light that seems to land very nearby their post in the woods, and four of them head out to investigate it…only to disappear. When three of them are finally returned to their sleepy seaside town, struggling to recover their own memories, they have no idea how their lives have been and will be changed forever.
Penguin refers to this book as genre-bending, and I couldn’t agree more. While it definitely leans toward sci-fi, it’s also historical fiction, and I loved the blending and blurring and incorporation of the two, which I think the author did an excellent job with, to be honest.
It sounds awesome, right? Okay, so here’s my biggest complaint about this book:
There needed to be more.
There was so much good stuff to explore here. SO MUCH. This absolutely could have and should have been a full series of books going more in depth, but it seems like we should have been laying that groundwork already. I can see how perhaps this could have been difficult to query or even publish and maybe this isn’t even the type of thing a lot of audiences would go for these days, but I know I would have been all. Over. It.
There’s a lot to like about this book. A LOT. First of all, the overall concept. I mean?!?! If you’ve know me at all, you know I’m super into aliens, UFOs, the ideas of other dimensions and interplanetary travel—all of that. So to see that in a YA novel was so exciting. This is something that’s different and unique. Sometimes readers can get stuck in a bit of a rut with YA, going back to the same genres and ideas repeatedly, so it was a huge breath of fresh air to see something new and cool that we don’t talk about in this particular sphere all the time. Plus, the addition of the concept of the looming doom of the Cold War and living in this time period where things are so uncertain made things even more new and refreshing. I was just so excited to see something go outside “the norms” if you will and explore some different realms (uh, pun intended).
So excited in fact, that I wanted more of it.
There’s a lot in this book. There’s so much cram-packed into this one story. Not only is there the alien aspect, and the UFOs, and the mystery of the abduction, but they’re also doing some really cool, interesting things with times and the concept of space-time and possibly co-existing dimensions or simultaneously existing realities. And on top of all that, the author also delves into concepts of love and friendship and death and loss, family relationships and struggling with what your family expects of you vs. what you want for yourself, and she even tackles some difficult issues like racism and prejudice and even touches on the horrific issue of Japanese internment camps in America, which would have just been done away with shortly before this book tooks place, and which the one Japanese-American character and his family were, in fact, put in when he was a child, and which I assure you I did not once learn about in any of the several schools I went to as a child due to moving around a lot. Nope, I learned about that from guess where? Reading. And whenever I would mention it at school, other kids didn’t believe me that that was a real thing that happened right here in the USA. Because it wasn’t. in. the history books.
But I digress.
The point is, there was a ton of interesting stuff in this book. But it was like getting one bite of a really good meal and then having the waiter sweep by your table and grab up your plate and take it all away.
There are a lot of characters in this book, but I think we were limited in getting to know them by how little room we had. There were so many of them, that I didn’t think everyone really got fair character development. It seemed like we really got to know and like a couple of the characters—like Bunny, who comes off as a bitch but is really just struggling with parental abandonment and having her life uprooted and moved across the country against her will (I mean, mood), or John, who has already been through so much in his young life and watched his parents struggle with endless prejudices as well as enduring his own, but still seems to have a smile and such a positive attitude. But other characters, we didn’t really get much out of. Like Frank, who kind of just got tagged as “the writer” and received very little development beyond that, or Oscar, who was more or less just “Frank’s sidekick.” There was even one character in this book who…I’m just being honest, I’m not even sure why she was there. I realize other people’s opinions might differ, but I couldn’t even figure out what purpose she served and I think the book would have functioned exactly the same without her existence.
But in addition to that, it was like the first 75% of the book is spent on what I felt was the build up. The seeing the strange light and then trying to figure out what the heck is going on. But once they do figure out what the heck is going on, it’s like oh my god. Mind blown. Big explosions. THIS IS WHERE THE GOOD STUFF IS. So good. I want to be careful what I say so as not to give away huge spoilers, but this is what I want, and it all kind of just gets brushed over as it feels like we rush toward the end of the story. I want to hear about their lives, I want to hear about the aliens, the alien technology, the thin spaces between dimensions and the kind of wavering boundaries of time/space and the cool ways they’re playing with them in this story. I want more of that, not 75% of this wondering what happened. All the fun stuff just gets brushed aside, even by the characters as they speed through the end of the book with hurried asides of “there’s no time to explain!” to the other characters in the book, which just feels like an excuse to not get into the good parts. I want there to be time to explain. Which there would be…if this were a series.
Maybe it still could be. Maybe it will be. What do I know?
So, I’m still going to give this four stars, I guess. It doesn’t feel right not to. But I want to be clear, I am giving it these stars for the concept, the uniqueness, the overall ideas. Writing a book is hard, and this was new and different and exciting to read, and it had aliens and UFOs, so, yeah, I’m giving it four stars. But at the end of the day, I just wanted more development and I think it suffered from getting curtailed too quickly. It was curtailed by being a standalone. That’s where I’m at.
I do think that this would be a really good place to start for people who are just getting into this genre or who are new to the ideas and discussion of UFOs and aliens, especially young adults who are just dipping their toes into sci-fi and don’t want to be overwhelmed or take on too much too quickly. And again, just what a relief to see something new and different. Penguin seems to be doing an excellent job taking on a range of different things for young readers, and I have to give them credit for that.
Skywatchers is out August 18th if you want to check it out and go on an alien adventure with these 1950s teens and tell me if I’m crazy for wanting more of this!