Guest

By: E. Stoops

Narrated by: Jeanie Talbot

Thione Aldermann, a third generation homesteader in the Columbia Valley, prides herself on having a plan for all of life's little eventualities and never being caught flat-footed. But her contingency plan for first contact is about a decade out of date.

Enter Guest, a spiderlike alien, who crash-lands in her back pasture. He's wounded, scared, unintelligible, and worse yet - clueless. Fortunately for Guest, Thione formulates a plan to help him, hide him, and when the time is right, heave him back to whence he came. But nosy neighbors and an untrustworthy sheriff imperil the fragile plan from the start, forcing Thione to pull up stakes and risk her farm to even have a chance at sending Guest home.

©2017 Elizabeth Stoops (P)2018 Jeanie Talbot

So Many Stars!

There are not enough stars to give this book, it needs so much more than five!

Happy Cottage Core

This book is the written equivalent of a cozy ASMR video where a woman with slightly frazzled hair makes you a cup of good tea and tells you a soft-spoken story about nothing much, but you couldn’t be more entranced to hear her tell it. I think once you are a woman of a certain age, you’ve met a Thione and admired her. If you are really lucky, you are friends with her. The narrator was highly believable as that sort of woman.

Nostalgic Return to Sci-Fi

Haven’t read sci-fi since I was a kid in the 60s or 70s but this book was given to me as a Christmas gift and I loved everything about it. It hit all the notes of this style of story. It was like it was written for me. A smart woman, an alien sidekick who really steals the show, science, and food! The food descriptions are unreal and completely engrossing. Sometimes the movie playing in my head was more like a cooking show. My mom did weight watchers and I recognized the terrible cottage cheese danishes Thione makes from my childhood. I could see the jello salads sitting in the fridge looking vaguely like solidified snot but also sort of futuristic. Everything comes back around and this felt like a truly believable woman’s life in what I assume is the mid-century of this century, so not too distant, but far enough away to believe the little changes that made the world so real.

wonderful performance

loved this book, it's a great road trip story! very much looking forward to the next one!

Surprisingly good supporting cast

Stoops does Theone and Guest so well but deserves some love for the amusing and wonderful supporting cast. Sometimes when an author does a book with two main characters, that's all they do, the rest of the world blurs out leaving the world feeling shallow. In Guest, care has been taken by both the author and narrator to give the supporting characters life of their own.