April May Is Insufferable and That’s the Whole Point

A statue shows up on 43rd Street and April can’t stop touching it

Here’s the setup. April May, a broke twenty-three-year-old designer in New York, is walking home at three in the morning when she finds a ten-foot robot samurai standing on the sidewalk. She thinks it’s public art. She calls her filmmaker friend Andy, they shoot a goofy video, she names the thing Carl, and by morning she’s famous. Because the statues (there are dozens of them, all identical, in cities around the world, all appearing at the same instant) turn out not to be art at all.

That’s the engine. Not “what are the Carls,” although that question runs underneath everything. The real engine is: what does sudden, planetary-scale attention do to a person who is not even slightly equipped to handle it?

And the answer, per April, is that it turns you into a bit of a monster.

I want to be fair to the book about what it’s doing here, because I think a lot of people bounced off April and called her unlikable as if the author didn’t know. He knows. Green builds in a framing device (April is narrating all of this from some point after the events, and she keeps interrupting herself to say some version of “I was awful here, and I knew it, and I did it anyway”). She sacrifices her relationship, her friendships, her safety, and eventually a lot more, all for the drug of being looked at. The novel is very clear that this is a tragedy dressed up as an adventure.

The good stuff is genuinely sharp. The plot is where it wobbles.

Let me start with what works, because a lot of it does.

The Dream sequences are the best invention in the book. After the Carls arrive, people around the world start sharing the exact same dream, a kind of collaborative puzzle-box: a hallway of doors, a sequence you have to solve, an “AI defense” you have to talk your way past. Humanity solves it together, in real time, crowdsourced, and Green (who built his whole career on internet communities) writes collective online problem-solving better than almost anyone because he has actually watched it happen. That part hums. It feels true in a way most fictional internet does not.

And the fame stuff cuts. There’s a running thread about April deciding, mid-crisis, to be publicly bisexual less because she’s ready and more because it’s good content and good for The Movement, and the book is honest enough to sit in how gross that calculation is. Her on-again girlfriend Maya is the moral center of the whole thing, and every time Maya calls her out, April is clearly, provably in the wrong, and you can feel Green refusing to let his narrator off the hook.

Now the criticism, and it’s a real one: the actual sci-fi plot is the least interesting thing here, and the back third leans on it hardest. Once the Carls stop being a mystery about us and start being an actual first-contact plot with a purpose and an antagonist (a fear-mongering media figure named Peter Petrawicki and his movement, which is the book’s stand-in for weaponized online outrage), the whole thing gets thinner. The mechanics of what the Carls want are hand-wavy. The Petrawicki side is drawn a little too neatly as Obviously The Bad Guys. For a novel this smart about how complicated online mobs are, the villainy is weirdly simple.

Bear with me on a tangent. I read most of this on a delayed flight, the kind where you’re stuck at the gate for two hours and everyone’s phone-lit and miserable, and there’s a stretch where April is doomscrolling her own mentions, watching strangers debate whether she’s a hero or a fraud, and I looked up from the page at a whole terminal of people doing the exact thing the paragraph described. It’s not subtle, that mirror. But it landed harder because of where I was sitting. Books do that sometimes. You get lucky with the room.

Should I question my own taste here? Probably. I have a soft spot for books that are secretly about the internet, and I wonder if I’m grading this one up because it flatters my particular anxieties. A reader who came to it purely for the alien first-contact premise has every right to feel bait-and-switched, and I don’t think they’d be wrong. The title promises wonder; the book delivers a media satire with a robot in it. Your mileage genuinely depends on which of those you wanted.

The prose, I’ll say plainly, is fine. Not lyrical, not trying to be. Green writes like a very smart YouTuber talking to you, which is to say it’s clear and fast and occasionally a little too pleased with its own explanations. April narrates like she’s making a video essay about her own life. Sometimes that’s the point. Sometimes it’s just a lot of telling.

This is a first-contact novel where the aliens are the least interesting characters in it, and the most interesting one is the algorithm that made a girl famous for standing next to a statue.

About Hank Green

You probably know Hank as one half of the Vlogbrothers, the YouTube channel he’s run with his brother John (yes, that John Green, “The Fault in Our Stars” John Green) since 2007, back when YouTube was mostly cats. Hank built an entire internet ecosystem out of educational videos, a music career about being a nerd, VidCon, and a genuinely huge, genuinely earnest online community. So when he writes a debut novel about internet fame, community, and the weird intimacy of being watched by strangers, he is not guessing. He has lived on both sides of that particular glass. “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” was his first novel, and it reads like someone who knows this world in his bones deciding to finally say something honest about what it cost. It’s a debut with a chip on its shoulder, and I like it better for that.

If April got under your skin, read these next

• “A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor” by Hank Green (the direct sequel, more confident, splits the narration across multiple characters, and honestly fixes some of book one’s balance problems).
• “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline if you want the pop-culture, crowd-solves-a-puzzle energy, though it’s far less self-aware about its own protagonist.
• “The Circle” by Dave Eggers for the darker cousin of this book’s argument about visibility, surveillance, and what we trade for attention.
• “Several People Are Typing” by Calvin Kasulke if you just want a smart, funny novel that treats the internet as a real place with real stakes.

You can grab a copy over on Amazon here if you want to argue with April yourself.

For your book club

1. April repeatedly tells us she behaved badly and then does it anyway. Did the framing device make you forgive her, or resent her more for knowing better?
2. Is April’s public coming-out a genuine act, a strategic one, or both at once, and does the book judge her fairly for it?
3. The novel argues that online fame is a kind of addiction. Did you find that convincing, or too tidy an excuse for her choices?
4. Petrawicki and his movement are drawn pretty clearly as the villains. Would the book have been braver if he were harder to dismiss?
5. The Carls themselves stay mostly mysterious. Did that ambiguity work for you, or did you want real answers about what they wanted?