This book rose to the Read and Loved section of my book list before I was even done with it. Bottom line up front: The Humans by Matt Haig is freaking beautiful.
Following my commitment not to give spoilers leaves me searching for ways to describe the story. I’ll do my best.
An alien without a name comes to our own dinky Earth in the guise of a professor named Andrew Martin. Everything about us…and the living things on our planet in general…disgusts and appalls him. He has a mission, of course, but in order to do it he lives Andrew Martin’s life. His wife, his son, his dog and all the other assorted characters in Andrew’s life must be interacted with in an appropriate fashion, but in doing so, he starts to see the wonder in what we take for granted every single day. And the journey is one the reader will remember for a long time after the last page is read.
Okay, so what makes that so amazing? The writing, the way the story is told and the absolutely genuine flow of the entire thing. I have a general rule when writing that comes from reading far more than I write and it is this: Too much striving for beautiful sentences exhausts the reader. It should not be the goal of every sentence, but rather the punctuation in the story.
We’ve all read books like that, haven’t we? The ones where the sentences have been tortured on the rack so that everything just screams “labor of love” or “tortured writer”? Yeah, those. They’re so exhausting to read I eventually start laughing and saying things out loud like, “Oh, aren’t you precious?”
Never fear, this isn’t that book. But what Matt Haig does in this book is even rarer than the book filled with perfectly crafted sentences. This book is filled with perfectly crafted sentences that don’t read that way. The story is (and the sentences are) wonderful to read and so easy that it takes a second look to realize how much work had to go into it.
This is an amazingly well-written book.
And then there’s Andrew/Alien. What a portrait! Seriously, if I wasn’t so impressed I’d be pea green with jealousy! The way he looks at things is worth the read all on it’s own.
And the list at the end, Advice for a Human, is really enough to make a person cry and clap. If you listen to the audiobook (and I whole-heartedly recommend that because it was exceptionally well done) you’ll need to be sure you keep your hands on the wheel at ten and two for safety’s sake.
Am I gushing? Well, possibly. But in this case, it’s worth it. It’s no secret that I’m not in favor of ebooks that cost almost the same as paperbacks. It’s no secret that I tend to pass over those in favor of something more reasonable. I’ve made an exception in this case. I got the audiobook from the library originally for my terrible commute. After I got done with it, I immediately bought the book. It’s worth it.