PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY SANDWICHES FROM OUTER SPACE!

In Noah’s YA novel, a teenager’s casual hike in the woods turns into a zany search for a missing alien.

It’s the summer of 2019, and high schooler Violet Wilson is on a mission to resurrect the journalism club and student newspaper at Sky View High, near Bend, Oregon. She hopes to use them to fight against the sexist, “self-satisfied, pigheaded culture…growing like mold in her school.” However, just as she’s about to put together a proposal with best friend, Pamela Edison, Violet is tasked by her mother to babysit her two youngerbrothers, young teen Brad and 6-year-old Willys. Pamela convinces Violet to take her siblings on a hike in the hope that they’ll be distracted enough to give the girls time to work. During the outing, the boys stumble upon a silver flying saucer, which oddly contains a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Meanwhile, the U.S. governmenthas made contact with alien creatures called Goobexes who happen to look just like PB&Js; the extraterrestrials are searching for their lost child, Goobex 3. The kids soon find themselves on an epic adventure to bring Goobex 3 back to its parents, including dizzying helicopter rides to FBI facilities; meetingswith a nonsensical, Donald Trump-like U.S. president; encounters with alien technology; and manhunts in the forest. Noah’s novel delivers fun sibling dynamics as it touches on some intriguing subjects, including media literacy and conspiracy theories. However, it doesn’t dig into these topics’ complexities in a significant way; for example, Violet is often portrayed as thinking about the truth behind things (“Many of the students I know have learned to reject facts in favor of slogans. They give more weight to personal bias than to science and history”), but her ruminations are so brief that they come off as platitudes, leaving little room for further engagement.

A wacky adventure with entertaining characters but underdeveloped themes.