On Earth As It Is On Television

I would actually give this book 3.5 stars, very much like Before the Coffee Gets Cold. The two are very comparable books. Both books are contemporary and cozy feeling fantasies with a bit of magical realism. They both challenge the reader to think about life and relationships in a bigger way. Both books follow multiple storylines that all come together. And both would make better movies than books, I think.

On Earth As It Is On Television is a charming book, lighthearted in tone. It's very often funny, especially if you live in modern America. The author takes a swipe at many of our modern archetypes, like the militia coworker of one of our protagonists, Blaine.

Blaine is one of the people whose lives are greatly impacted when aliens unmistakably come to Earth one day, causing extreme, global panic. But then they disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as they came. What was that all about? That's really the best thing about this book, that particular premise. And I don't think the author did as much with that as she could have.

After the aliens left, people went back to their (almost) normal routines. But would the aliens come back? What had happened? And why?

The characters in this book are almost all likeable -- a huge plus for me. Strangely, although I love children in real life, the two characters I couldn't stomach at all were Blaine's children.

They were a big part of the lower rating for me: everything about the children's interaction was so annoyingly twee. And there was far too much of it. There was so much written description of all the little baby talk they do around the cat. I just found them incredibly tedious all the way around.

The other problem, the much bigger problem, was the pacing. I felt like the book was repetitive and dragged in many spots. I kept putting it down and having to force myself to pick it back up. I found myself grinding my teeth while skimming over everything about Blaine's family.

Another real problem with the pacing, aside from it feeling like it took too long for the plot points to move forward, was that the same character development points seemed to be made over and over. The author has a good way with words. She has some charming turns of phrase. But it felt like she left in some pet sentences because they were nicely written, and it made the book too cumbersome overall.

It's a nice book for dallying in the valley, if you're not so plot-driven and are just there to enjoy some interesting turns of phrase and observations about American pop culture.