By the fall of 2007, one well-timed leak revealing that the U.S. government might have engaged in first contact has sent the country into turmoil, and it is all Cora Sabino can do to avoid the whole mess. The force driving this controversy is Cora's whistle-blower father, and even though she hasn't spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government - and redirected it to her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father's leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him - until she learns just how deeply her family is entrenched is in the cover-up, and that an extra-terrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades.
To save her own life, she offers her services as an interpreter to a monster, and the monster accepts.
Learning the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to find the truth is not as a whistle-blower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. But in becoming an interpreter, she begins to realize that she has become the voice for a being she cannot ever truly know or understand, and starts to question who she's speaking for - and what future she's setting up for all of humanity.
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On the morning of the second meteor, Cora's 1989 Toyota Camry gave up the ghost for good. 1
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(@TitanBooks, 21 July 2020, 384 pages, ebook, #ARC from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I'd no idea what to expect from this book but I was looking for something a bit different. I've started to read more sci-fi recently as it's a genre I neglect a lot. I also really enjoy alternative histories. Cora is a great main character, flawed but easy to get behind, an unlikely person to be involved in first contact with an alien race due to her father's infamous leaked hoax. I liked the style of the writing and quickly got caught up in the story. The dialect and behaviour of the aliens took a while to get used to. I also liked the leaked hoax documents dotted between the chapters.
