Waiting in the Sky, by Keith A Pearson

ISBN: 9798455146015
Amazon ID: B09CL1XGF9

This is a deeply disappointing book, especially if you have read any of the author's good books:

• Meeting Mungo Thunk (excellent)
• The '86 Fix (not bad, worth reading)

Compared to those, Waiting in the Sky is a very disappointing novel, and also a complete let-down if you believed the summary on the Amazon sales page:

"It's hard to fit in where you don't belong … particularly if you belong on a planet 2,500,000 light-years away.

"Despite living on Earth for almost thirty years, Simon Armstrong knows he is not of our world.

"Still, with his interplanetary mission almost over, he’ll soon be saying goodbye to a life he’s struggled to navigate and the humans he doesn’t much like. The only creature he’ll likely miss will be Merle, the antisocial cat he shares his home with."

The above description turns out to be a complete con. I assume it comes from the back cover, or the inside front cover (I don't know, since I didn't buy a dead tree edition) of the book itself.

The first 22 chapters (of 58) are a good enough story, about what you expect it to be, based on the description above, which persuaded you to buy and read the book.

Chapter 23 turns things around in a rather surprising way, and then the whole thing goes not so much downhill, as into free-fall, from there onwards.

In the afterword following chapter 58 you find out that the story is in fact based on the true-life mental health problems of the author (who does not have interplanetary origins). It's not made completely clear how much of the story is literally true, and how much has simply provided a basis on which to create the fiction, but compared to what you thought you were going to be reading about, this is something so totally different that the marketing is simply deceitful.

So, if you want to read some decent fiction by this author, I recommend Meeting Mungo Thunk.

If you want a good story about an alien who doesn't belong on Earth and looks forward to getting off it again, I recommend Douglas Adams.

Don't read Waiting in the Sky if what the marketing people wrote about it seems appealing to you.

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