An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
I finished Hank Green's novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, almost a week ago, but I'm a PhD student so this weekend is the first time I've had a free moment to reflect on it. My thoughts?
Wow.
WOW.
This book had a lot of things I want out of novel and even more I didn't know I wanted:
- Aliens
- Robots
- Contagious dreams
- Queer romance
- Internet fame
- Puzzles
- An alliteratively named villain
- A lovably flawed protagonist
- Grape jelly
- And
- Wait for it
- A grad student!!!
Miranda Beckwith is a graduate student at UC Berkely studying materials science. She is an essential part of the team helping the protagonist, April May, decipher the codes presumably sent by their alien visitor(s). She becomes the CEO of a website that the team sets up to help collect information from other cipher solvers. And, perhaps the most remarkable thing, once all is said and done and the world returns to normal (more or less), she goes back to Berkeley to finish her degree.
Can you imagine the conversation with her advisor that must have happened?!
Maybe I'm reading the wrong books, but I feel like grad students, especially grad students in STEM, rarely appear in fictional works. Honestly, I've read more books with unicorns in them (and that's not even counting the Harry Potter series). But there was one in this book! And, though she seemed to have a lot of time on her hands, she seemed fairly realistic. She really cared about her field and she seemed very passionate about furthering human knowledge while also sharing it with others. She's the kind of grad student I'd like to be. I mean, if I had the opportunity to use my skillset to communicate aliens/robots and then go back and complete my PhD, I'd like to think I would.
Anyway, aside from including a relatively accurate depiction of a female grad student in a STEM field, this book is amazing for lots of other reasons. It would take me days to list them all here and I've got a degree of my own to worry about. So long story short, if you get the chance, I highly recommend reading An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. Or, at the very least, getting the audiobook from your library like I did. (Kristen Sieh's reading is amazing!)
