Tuesday, March 14, 2017

The Librarian: A First Contact Story, by M.N. Arzu

CreateSpace, ISBN 9781514142059, June 2015

These aliens don't arrive in giant spaceships hovering over major cities.

They don't blast us from space.

They didn't even intend to make contact. They just wanted to study us, quietly and unobtrusively.

That worked, right up until the retrieval of their investigator didn't go as intended.

An ordinary, happily married, librarian waiting for her husband to come home from a day of hiking gets a knock on the door that lands her in the middle of something she would have thought impossible.

Now she has to figure out if this alien who looks like her husband, who says he is her husband of twelve years, is here for good reasons or bad, and what he wants and intends, because he won't talk to the military or anyone at all except her.

The librarian is an honest, upright woman, who wants to do the right thing, but mainly wants her husband back. The general charged with overseeing this operation, which looked like and might yet be a nuclear event, wants to protect the country and, when he realizes what he's dealing with, the planet.

In a fairly short span of pages, we get interesting character development for the librarian, the general, some of his staff, and in many ways most interesting of all, the alien.

Something about the story-telling feels old-fashioned to me. i can't put my finger on it. Regardless, it's an enjoyable and interesting novelette.

Recommended.

I received this book as a gift, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

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