I've been following Lindsay Ellis's work since I was about fifteen, and I was worried that would color my reading experience a lot. It didn't. There were a few things that were reminiscent to me of things she's mentioned in her videos, but it didn't in any way hinder my reading experience.

The book follows Cora, daughter of an egomaniac whistleblower and college dropout, accidentally becoming the spokesperson for the alien Ampersand. Over the course of the book, the threat of an alien attack becomes juxtaposed with the thread of one faction of the aliens committing genocide against the other faction. A lot of the book follows the difficulties of communication between two species so fundamentally other, and that is really the core of what makes this enjoyable to read. At the same time, Cora as a protagonist is deeply relatable to me both because of her conflicting emotions about her family and her relationship to Ampersand. A few times towards the beginning, the pop culture references are a little jarring to me, because they're so dated, but ultimately they are very of the time this book is set. It becomes kind of comforting by the end -- like, imagine a president stepping down because it was revealed that he lied under oath. What a nice time that must have been. My only other real issues were the frequent traveling interludes, which got kind of repetitive to me.

The core relationships are between Cora and her aunt, who worked for the government and kept a lot of secrets from her family, Cora and Ampersand, which, uh, I saw that twist coming a mile away and that might be because I've followed Ellis's work for so long but also might just be genre convention, and also Cora and her father. I'm excited to see, in the sequel, if Cora's relationship with her father is resolved and if Cora's sense of isolation and purposelessness is resolved.

(I mean I guess the existential threat to the planet part, too).