Take a photo of a barcode or cover
wardenred 's review for:
Overgrowth
by Mira Grant
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Who cares if I think I’m an alien plant person? That part’s fine. Everyone has their little delusions. The trouble is the way I keep saying it out loud.
First, a note to my fellow arachnophobes: at a pivotal moment of the book, a really big spider appears. It comes with at least a full cumulative page of vivid descriptions of all of its spiderly attributes. I wish I was warned about this going in, so I’m doing my part warning others.
Now, onto the actual review! I’ve been reading Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire’s books for years, as well as following her on social media, and I’m well acquainted with her occasional “I hope my alien armada comes soon” half-jokes and the story of her getting lost in the woods as a small kid only to announce to her mother upon arrival, “The aliens took your real baby, but it’s okay, I’m here now.” So when I realized she was taking this personal experience and turning it into a story, I was instantly curious, but also kind of… apprehensive? Because when you fictionalize your private experiences like this, it can be a basis for an exciting story for sure, but it can also turn into a narrative so close to the author’s heart that it’s hard to grok it unless you’re in the know. Which may have actually happened here, to an extent.
I really appreciated the pre-invasion part of the book. It was a little rough around the edges, but Stasia's experiences of not fitting in yet surrounding herself with a found family and doing her best day by day were incredibly relatable. And then there was the way her loved one appeared to take her alien-ness seriously only to reveal, when proof of her words appeared, that they’ve been mostly indulging her indifferent ways. These interactions were written so well and struck such a chord in me. Everyone was hurting, everyone was unintentionally hurting each other, and nobody was completely in the right, and I had empathy for all of them.
At this point of the book, I feel the aliens as an allegory for transgenders and neurodivergence still worked, for the most part, although I did keep coming back to how *the aliens were body-snatchers who murdered and replaced actual kids*. That’s really an odd angle for tackling the metaphor, because it sort of takes the side of the families who feel their son “killed their daughter” by coming out as trans/transitioning, or those who think that vaccines or something in the water or whatever “made their kids autistic.” Like the metaphor’s saying, “Yes, you could have had a normal kid, but you’ve got this terrible, dangerous thing instead—but look, it’s still got feelings and a personality and wants to be loved.” As a trans and neurodivergent person, I’m not sure how I feel about this. But like I’ve said, the experience of alienation in itself was so well done and made me feel so seen and understood.
As the story progressed into the actual invasion, though, things kept getting weirder. I think this same story could have worked so well if there was a deeper dive into the nuances, but the tone of the narrative kept circling back to, “aliens are just being themselves, and humans should have acted differently if they wanted to survive; also, isn’t that great that some of them are allowed to keep on living by getting changed into aliens?” So basically, the narrative was pretty firmly on the side of a genocidal force that will either murder or assimilate you just because they want your planet, and also, isn’t this all beautiful? I’m sorry, but eh. Again, I don’t necessarily mind this angle; the book *is* billed as horror, after all, and I think that leaning harder into the gap between how natural all this ends up feeling to Stasia and the fringe horror of it all could have made for a more interesting, layered, and nuanced story. This specific execution though—very sadly—fell on the flat side for me.
Speaking of execution, I was really surprised by the number of small errors in the book that should have been caught in line editing. I’m talking typos, verbs in wrong tense, lost prepositions, “intermediate” instead of “intermediary,” things like “said Toni blithely” repeating 2+ times per page. It wasn’t catastrophic by any means; nothing I would bat an eye on if this was a fanfic or free web serial, or even if this was an indie book by an author who probably didn’t have the funds for a proper editor and had to make do with Grammarly and a couple of beta readers. For a novel from a major publishing house written by a big name author, though, this was kind of weird.
Graphic: Body horror, Child death, Confinement, Death, Genocide, Xenophobia, Blood, Medical trauma, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Mental illness, Transphobia, Medical trauma