Atlantic County Library System

Messy and floundering in late midlife, Dana Spiotta's heroine is roiling — along with the rest of the country — amid the 2016 election and the rise of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements.

(Image credit: Penguin Random House)

UnCovered review by Debbie Brahmi, ACLS Pleasantville Branch

The Humans is a science fiction book for people (like me) who HATE science fiction!

I picked it up because I thoroughly enjoyed The Midnight Library, also written by Matt Haig, and I was intrigued by the fact that The Humans was described as a “funny, compulsively readable novel” about an alien who is sent to Earth to inhabit the body of the deceased Professor Andrew Martin and destroy all evidence that Martin had solved a major mathematical problem that would advance human civilization. The aliens are superior lifeforms, and they want to preserve their dominance in the universe.

The “funny” begins when the alien sent to Earth starts to enjoy his new life as a human (he even falls in love with Martin’s wife, who has NO idea he is not her husband!), and he must then decide to either complete his mission and return to his home planet or remain on Earth and live the remainder of his life as a less than superior human. What would you do??