Do you expect to read about the zombie apocalypse when you start a science fiction story. No? Me neither. Nor do I expect to see alien spacecraft left parked in a small town doing nothing, nor a 16 year old girl main character who doesn’t fall in love nor a town where the factory owner rebuilds the factory after a fire instead of shipping everything off to China. Gene Doucette’s The Spaceship Next Door is original, interesting and fun and even the zombies are believable.
The plot revolves around the spaceship that landed in Sorrow Falls, rural northwestern Massachusetts 3 years ago and since then has done…nothing. At least nothing that anyone can see. There is a full contingent of UFO tin hat types, all camped across the road, all with homemade instruments looking for radiation? color? sound? anything? And more to the point, an army base with plenty of real instruments that feed data to a board of Nobel prize-winning scientists all looking and waiting for the ship to do…something.
Characters
Annie is 16, pretty used to taking care of herself because her father’s gone all the time and her mother has cancer and can’t handle normal parent/adult responsibilities. Annie is extraordinarily outgoing and friendly and knows just about everybody in town. She works part time at the local diner/conversation hub and the library and visits the tin hat camper contingent every day and she’s smart, a little bit like Anne of Green Gables.
Annie is the only character that Doucette develops thoroughly, and through her we meet Ed, the government agent who investigates an anomaly from the spaceship, plus Violet, Doug, Rick and four of the nutty campers.
Ed is a bit of a cipher. He is responsible, warm and friendly to Annie, in fact he agrees to act as her guardian while her mom is hospitalized out of town. Yet he is also the author of the plan to bomb the town with nuclear weapons if necessary. It felt to me as if he wore his analyst hat at work and didn’t think about what it was he was analyzing, that it was people.
Annie’s best friend Violet is a placeholder with little personality, in fact it’s a running joke with Annie and Violet that no one remembers Violet after meeting her. Of course there is a reason for that!
No Romance
It was so refreshing to read a novel featuring a 16 year old girl who did not have a romance with a vampire/werewolf/demigod/demon/alien/super hero or even with a normal guy. Annie likes guys just fine and she’s attracted to Sam, an army corporal, and good friends with her neighbor Doug.
Pacing and Ending
Several reviewers on Amazon felt The Spaceship Next Door was slow, but I didn’t feel that. The plot takes a while to kick off while we get to know Annie and meet the camper folks, her friends, Ed and the army guys. This is not a high octane action story.
The ending was a bit unsatisfying. We don’t know what comes next with the aliens, the spaceship or the ex-zombies. We get hints that Annie will go blithely on to her future but that doesn’t seem likely given she got the brain dump from a multi-zillion year old alien. We get the obligatory threats from an evil government guy but Annie doesn’t waste time feeling threatened.
YA or Adult?
Despite Annie’s age The Spaceship Next Door is not listed as nor marketed as YA fiction (maybe because there are no nonsense love stories with vampires or demons). Teens would like it but the book is primarily an adult, straightforward science fiction story about first contact with a twist.
Summary
The Spaceship Next Door was a happy find. I was glad to have it on my Nook list and glad I read it. It is not so compelling to warrant 5 stars, but an excellent read, most enjoyable.
4 Stars
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