Hello and happy Wednesday. I am actually writing this on Tuesday so that, regardless of how productive I feel, you get a review. During the weekend, I got into this reading kick and finished not one but two books, but I was sort of exhausted of looking at my iPad and Kindle screens, and they were too, which is why I went to my bookshelf and picked a physical book to read while my devices charged and my eyes rested. That led to me reading Love and Other Alien Experiences all through Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.

See, there are many reasons why I still love and prefer physical books (even though ebooks are cheaper and more convenient to carry around), but I think the most important one for me is that I fly through physical books, especially paperbacks. I don’t know if it has to do with the way they’re formatted or what, but I feel that it takes me at least half the time to read a physical book than it does an ebook, even if they have the same number of pages, and this happened with Love and Other Alien Experiences. I was glued to it. I could not put it down, and when I did, I was giggling and also wishing I could find someone who liked me the way that the love interest likes our main character.

I know this hasn’t really been a review so far, but here you have it. Mallory, our main character, is suffering from a beautiful combination of severe anxiety and agoraphobia (which might also be a form of severe anxiety? I’m not sure, I’m going to ask my sister about it though), and this prevents her from leaving her house. Even walking to the porche has her breaking out in a sweat. She attends school online, but this is a pre-pandemic book, so it’s not as common or as sophisticated as we might think now that we’ve (thankfully) survived those times. Then, a series of circumstances basically align themselves and challenge Mallory to interact more with the outside world, both her surroundings and the people in them, and it’s raw and hard at times, but all in all, it’s amazing.

If, like me, you read and loved Optimists Die First, Finding Aubrey and/or Turtles All the Way Down, then you’ll adore this book. You can thank me later.