Life in Outer Space by Melissa Keil
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Life in Outer Space is a romantic comedy about a movie geek & the dream girl he refuses to fall in love with. Sam Kinnison is a geek, and he’s totally fine with that. He has his horror movies, his nerdy friends, World of Warcraft – and until Princess Leia turns up in his bedroom, worry about girls he won’t. Then Camilla Carter arrives on the scene. She’s beautiful, friendly and completely irrelevant to his plan. Sam is determined to ignore her, except that Camilla has a plan of her own – and he seems to be a part of it! Sam believes that everything he needs to know he can learn from the movies. But perhaps he’s been watching the wrong ones.
Yes. HELL YES.
This book is made of awesome. This book is a unicorn puking rainbows onto the rest of the YA Contemporary genre.
I needed this book. YOU NEED THIS BOOK. I had so much fun reading it that my face hurts from grinning.
The MC, Sam, is a self-confessed nerd. Not only that but he’s a believable nerd, one who’s constantly referencing the video games, movies, books and magazines that any self respecting geek knows and loves…in detail. His internal monologue is hilarious. I’d say this book is almost casually hysterical because Sam’s witty humor pervaded every scene and every interaction. I’m going to put a few quotes in this review and hopefully it’ll give you some idea of what I’m talking about.
Surrounding Sam are his best mates, Adrian, Allison and Mike. Like him, they’re misfits, bullied by the popular kids and relegated to hiding out in the IT lab during lunch. I love these little weirdos.
Adrian reminds me of Chunk from The Goonies (BEST MOVIE EVER). Aside from sharing a physical resemblance to him, he constantly word-vomits, loves candy bars and thinks he’s tougher than he is.
“Adrian appears beside me, glaring down the corridor. He has his about-to-open-a-can-of-whoop-arse face on. Objectively, Adrian Radley has zero cans of whoop-arse to open.”
Allison is the lone female in the group. She has wispy blonde hair, the body of a twelve year old boy and is obsessed with Hello Kitty. Also:
“She grimaces a lot. I don’t always understand why. But in spite of the Hello Kitty, I know that a habitual grimacer is one of my people.”
Then we have Mike.
“Mike has been obsessed with karate since year seven, when he discovered that kicking people in the face was a legitimate sport.”
Mike also happens to be gay. Or so he thinks. When he tells his friends this, they embark on an ‘Extremely Gay Weekend’ in order to try and confirm it. I was crying laughing while reading these scenes. The best part?
“I don’t care that Mike is gay. I figure that since there’s little chance of either of us ever touching anyone else’s parts, our relative sexualities are somewhat pointless topics of conversation.”
Everyone say it with me: “HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH”
Everything changes for this group of friends when a new girl shows up in Sam’s English class. Her name is Camilla, her father is a famous rock journalist and if she wanted to, she could easily set herself up to be the most popular girl at school. Instead, she hangs out with the geeks and speaks their language. Sam, being used to his routine and slightly Sheldonian (I better not have to explain this to you) in his dislike of change, has no idea how to handle this at first.
He and Camilla’s shared love of World of Warcraft (be still my nerdy heart) helps him get over it. From there he tries to learn how to speak to her IRL and once that’s accomplished (sort of), he ends up trying to figure out this strange girl that can bounce from clique to clique and back again without repercussions.
Because of Camilla’s friendship, this group of misfits goes from being bullied, to being ignored, to being accepted (ish) and this book is mostly about their journey along the way and how it changes them as individuals as well as their friendships. I don’t want to get into the plot too much because pretty much everything I want to rave about lives in Spoilerville, so I’ll leave you with this:
If you’re looking for a humorous foray into the not-so-simple lives of high school geeks, this is the book for you. I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT.
I think I am going to stop reading these reviews if my bank account is ever going to speak to me again, excellent review, want to buy this book sooo much
BWAH HA HA! I feel your pain. I spend more money on books than any other “luxury” item. Luxury, ha. More like necessity.
I agree. This book sounds like something I’ll read. I haven’t read that much Contemporary books, since I’m also super picky on these genre of books.
I’m super picky with Contemporary books, too. I’ve one-starred too many of them to count, which is why I tend to fangirl like this when I find one I really like.