The Spaceship Next Door

Starred review from July 2, 2018
Doucette (Immortal Stories: Eve) delights with this wonderful example of speculative fiction that relies on startling concepts, beginning with “What if an alien ship landed and then nothing happened?” Nothing is exactly what the spaceship has done since it landed in Sorrow Falls, Mass., three years ago. Teenager Annie Collins is friendly with everyone in town, including the soldiers guarding the landing site, the camper-bound observers with their various theories, and the local patriarch. She also has her own ideas about “Shippie,” as she and her friend Violet call it in private. She’s a natural to assist government agent Edgar Somerville when he arrives to investigate both the ship and the town. Then the zombie sightings begin. Doucette writes winning characters who read like real people, and Sorrow Falls is similarly credible. The head-spinning ideas both power the narrative and invite the reader to think hard, while plenty of humor and action move the plot along. This excellent work will appeal to readers from middle school through adulthood.

July 1, 2018
Doucette's genial, leisurely novel feels like a throwback to the squeaky clean science fiction of the mid-20th century.Though marketed toward adults, this book would seem just as much at home in the young adult section. Its 16-year-old heroine, Annie Collins, is the smartest and most capable person in her little mill town in western Massachusetts, with the possible exception of her odd, home-schooled best friend, Violet. Annie is also probably the one who knows the most about the spaceship that landed in a nearby field in Sorrow Falls three years ago and has been sitting there ever since, observed with dismay and interest by the military and a group of "alien watchers" camped out in RVs equipped with surveillance equipment as close to the ship as the military will allow. Annie, whose personal life includes a mother dying of cancer and a semirequited crush on a young soldier with a lot of time on his hands, is recruited by a mysterious newcomer to help him get to know the town; Ed Somerville calls himself a journalist, but he seems to have connections to the military. Doucette (The Frequency of Aliens, 2017, etc.) takes his time advancing the plot, which finally picks up its pace in the last quarter of the book, when soldiers and townspeople, both alive and long dead, start behaving like zombies, leaving most of the novel's named characters to grab some wheels and head toward the spaceship in hopes of placating its inhabitants. The science behind the fiction is largely unconvincing, and Doucette's dialogue is often clunky and overloaded with exposition. But the town is vividly realized and described, and its physical and social reality helps ground the more unlikely elements of the story in a sense of place. Doucette's dry sense of humor and obvious affection for his characters go a long way toward compensating for the novel's meandering progress.Not so much a vision of a complicated future as a warmhearted ode to a simpler time and place in a community so small that everybody knows everybody else's business.

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August 1, 2018
Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, is an average-enough town?except for the UFO that landed there three years before. A UFO that has not moved or changed in three years. But it brings to town a different sort of person; that is what draws one 16-year-old girl, Annie Collins, to a new stranger claiming to be a reporter. Annie quickly spots the reporter for what he really is: a government operative. Annie is a fascinating girl who maneuvers her way into a government-sponsored job of helping the newcomer. She is also working in the town library, keeping her eye on the UFO, and taking care of her sick mother. At the same time that Annie is helping the government agent, the UFO is beginning to change. With a dynamic character like Annie and the background of a UFO, The Spaceship Next Door is a must-read hit. Originally self-published in 2015, Doucette's series starter deserves a wider audience. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)