This is a very odd book......and not in a fun way......the main character is convinced that he was abducted by aliens and the reader is never completely sure whether he is delusional or if this is true. Even at the end, the question is left open, and I hate that.........I don't really believe that aliens come down to probe humans, but I DO expect a story that clearly defines what is true....the whole idea of a hanging ending doesn't work when we're talking about delusions vs. reality....at least not for me..... This weird little book requires its readers to be very open minded about truth and reality (which can be a big ask for young people if they're anything like I was when growing up - I've learned to be less judgemental as I've gotten older). We don't know whether Mel is fantasising about his alien contact experience, or if it is supposed to have been real, and we don't know whether Hooper is supposed to be believed by the reader or not. He smells different, has long fingers and is definitely very strange, but then so are all the people at Mel's Alien Contact discussion group. And Mel generally seems to be pretty good at assessing the degree and likelihood of craziness in the other participants of the group, so maybe Hooper is really the alien that he claims to be. I began by thinking that our narrator, Mel, was going to be a particularly irritating character - if you read the back cover it includes a paranoid-sounding diatribe against normal boring people and their inability to understand his specialness based on his amazing alien abduction experience (which certainly doesn't make the book unattractive to Young Adults as they feel much of this too), but I found he grew on me. Mel has a softer, more sensitive side, which worries about the welfare and dependence of his alcoholic depressive Mum, and wonders if she will collapse or blossom if he leaves her to go to College, and this feeds into his ambivalence about the prospect and school success. He picks up stray and lost animals which have come to harm from human indifference, and he secretly values people and watches and understands them and their interactions. He's a sensitive and intelligent observer in a world of posturing hormones at school, and its no wonder he finds it impossible to relate to the more apparently assured of his peers.In the end, I was able to let go my wish to know the 'truth' what was being perceived by both Mel and his friends in the abduction group, and enjoy the metaphor of his alienation and that of Hooper, and just watch them operate and interact in this unpredictable world of the novel, but I'm not sure that I would have been able to do that when I was a YA myself. I think the lack of an obvious truth or a reliable narrator would have been very irritating to me when I was looking so hard for definitive answers to my questions about the world and my own identity. These memories make me worry about the potential popularity of this title in my library, or my ability to recommend it, but I did appreciate on a personal level the originality of concept.
What do You think about First Day On Earth (2011)?
Easy fun read - nothing wowing but worth the few hours it took to zip through.
—lacha
3.5 starsI was really surprised at how this little book was so heartbreaking.
—Shannon
It's a pretty enjoyable book but I didn't like the ending very mcih
—Arthuaaa
Pretty simplistic, but might be good for reluctant readers
—Addi
