I love how the author spoke about life through Henry's eyes and the casual alien abducting him. Despite that addition, it all felt too painfully real. This is, my friends - without any doubt - the most unexpected and remarkable book I've read this year (and the year before, if I'm being honest), soothing and yet poignant at the same time. I feel as if I should wait and write a better review because let's face it, my midnight thoughts hardly come close to what this book deserves but I can't. I'm ecstatic and barely thinking straight as huge is its impact on me, and honestly? I need to vent. For me...this book is less about being gay -( but Henry is gay), or coming of age - ( but he is still very young), but more about how we deal with grief - at any age!

All the characters are so well-developed, all are complex, none are throwaway. Hutchinson weaves relationships gradually, throughout the novel, showing all the layers that exist underneath the surface and - ultimately - showing that every person has more than one side, is more than one thing.I stayed up until nearly 2:00 a.m. to finish this book and I cannot stop thinking about it. Honestly, I read a good amount of YA fiction, and a lot of it is tremendously well-written and emotionally evocative, but I've not been this blown away by a book since I read Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun, which made my list of the best books I read in 2014. Ants begin their lives as eggs about the size of a period at the end of a sentence. Some eggs are used as food, while others hatch into larvae. Larvae eat and grow rapidly, molting as their size increases. When larvae grow large enough, they metamorphize into pupae. Pupae look more like adult ants, although their legs and antennae remain folded against their bodies, and they're lighter in color. Eventually, they'll emerge as adults and fulfill their role in the colony. Depending on the species, the entire process can take several weeks to several months. Types of Ants Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat. There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you. Despite what you’ve spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they’re living it better. They’re learning to speak French or screwing their brains out instead of loafing on the couch in their boxers, stuffing their face with bowl after bowl of Fruity Oatholes while wondering why they’re all alone on a Friday night. But that’s not even the worst part. What’s really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I’ll die, you’ll die, we’ll all die, and the things we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, will amount to nothing.

First, I think if I had gone into this book understanding that it was a coming of age story, that dealt with bullying, dysfunctional families, suicide, gay relationships, Alzheimers, etc., I would have rated it 4 stars, because it does a good job in those areas and maintained my interest (in spite of some repetitiveness). Fortunately I like coming of age stories.Depression isn't a war you win. It's a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It's one bloody fray after another.”This story is truly holds such an important discussion about mental illness and how it is something that you have to always manage and keep up with, because it never goes away, no matter how many alien abductions happen. And I’m going to leave some numbers here: The novel ends ambiguously, as it is never revealed if Henry pushes the big red button or not. It is clear that he decides to move on with his life and live in the present, rather than dwelling on Jesse’s death. In a way, this is what Audrey had been telling him all along. Diego urges him to “write for the future.” I’m not someone who judges a book by the number of trigger warnings it needs. To be honest, the pre-release discussion around Ninth House really pissed me off, because a book doesn’t need to be under a certain restriction for the number of difficult topics it’s allowed to include. And in Ninth House, everything that was included was included for a reason.