Review of First Day on Earth by Cecil Castellucci

Shelved as disappointed, reviews, what a nice cover, that was pretty deep

According to Goodreads.

Link to book: First Day on Earth by Cecil Castellucci

Link to Goodreads review: My older review of First Day on Earth

Imagine the look on my face when one paragraph in, one of the first sentences I see says,

But you don't know shit.

I can assure you that I was not happy nor amused.

This book seemed to make a huge effort to be philosophical at any chance it could. Once in a while it made it. Sometimes I would read something like this:

Always solace in a book.

But most of the time it was more like this:

My life sucks. So I shave my head.

I think this is pretty self-explanatory.



The main character Mal, short for Malcolm, is a loner, caught at the fringes of high school and well, humanity. He is quite convinced that he was abducted by aliens. And the running plot throughout the book is him trying to go live with them in outer space or something.

The name Mal created some very interesting nicknames. There was even a entire page dedicated to various words that start with "mal". My personal favorite: Malignant.

Mal's father left several years before the start of the story, which Mal uses to point out the problems that his family faces because of it. It was my belief that this was the source of many of Mal's seemingly psychological problems.But despite the somewhat disturbing plot line, there were a few inconsistencies that bothered me longer than they should have.

When Mal is retelling the story of how he was kidnapped by the aliens, he describes it feeling like he was gone for an hour, though he was actually gone for three days. After this, he says that the pain from being poked and prodded soon became familiar. My question is how can anything become familiar after an hour?

There was also some odd dialogue in this story. And by odd I mean creepy. When Mal was talking to Posey (some random girl adventuring with him), he tells her this:

You're perfect. You have a perfect life. Perfect friends. Perfect tits. You fit in perfectly.

You don't just tell a girl that she has perfect tits...Don't cross that line you creepy pervert...She then proceeds to take off her shirt and show them her nipple-less breasts, a highly-unlikely thing to happen in my opinion, even if she was trying to prove a point.

Overall, I thought this book was a good example of an author trying to assume how teenagers talk. Even though there was a lot of awkwardness throughout the book, I enjoyed the concept.

But I didn't enjoy it enough. Awkward writing, dialogue, and characters dragged this book's rating down for me.

As usual, I respect authors and how much time they spend on writing a book, no matter the review I give it.


FINAL RATING:

Disagree? Have a comment? Question? Wanna tell me your life story? Then comment down below!