ARC Review: Life in Outer Space by Melissa Kiel

My Saturday just exploded with awesomeness after I finish reading this book. I am SO in love with this book. Really in love.

Title: Life in Outer Space by Melissa Keil
Release Date: February 1st 201
Published by: Hardie Grant Egmont
Source: Publisher (Thanks, Jen!)
Buy: Book Depository

Summary (from Goodreads):

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, he doesn’t have to worry about girls.

Then Sam meets Camilla. She’s beautiful, friendly and completely irrelevant to his life. Sam is determined to ignore her, except that Camilla has a life of her own – and she’s decided that he’s going to be part of it.

Sam believes that everything he needs to know he can learn from the movies ... but now it looks like he’s been watching the wrong ones.

How do you start writing a review for a book you really love? I can barely find the right words to describe just how much a gem of a read Life in Outer Space is. We have Sam, movie buff and overall a geek. His life is a jumble of everyday torture from schoolmates, tiptoeing around the house and ignoring the fact that his parents are about to get a divorce, and hanging out in the computer lab room with equally geeky friends. Sam's days are carefully planned, that is, until Camilla walks into his life. She's the new girl, a force to reckon with, with a renowned figure in music as a father, and she turned Sam's life upside down the moment she handed her laptop to him and asked if he plays Warcraft.

This book is oh so wonderful because everything about it is. Sam? Of course! Where do you read of a male lead who quotes movie lines every single chance he gets, do a movie marathon of Zombieland withi his mom, writes screenplays on his spare time, watch other equally geeky movies and hang out in a comic store with his friends? Yep, that's Sam. He's smart, socially awkward, and infinitely funny. Then there's Camilla. Of course, Camilla! The girl who's got questionable fashion sense even according to Sam, who's friends with everyone, who knows more about movies and music than she lets on, who pushes Sam to get guitar lessons while she's halfway across the world when Sam's life is in shambles. They're like two parallel lines who are never supposed to intersect at all, but somewhere along the way, the lines were actually bent and their paths collided and entwined when you least expect it to. (This is such a geeky analogy, but you get it, right?)

Hilariously funny all throughout, I find myself laughing about a lot of things in this book more times than I can count. Sam's friends are a riot, that's for sure. I love that this book is not just about Sam and Camilla and their rib tickling encounters and eventual friendship, but it's also about Sam's bestfriends: Allison, a girl who somehow worries about her hair and if it suits her, Adrian, a bouncy boy who speaks before he thinks, and Mike, a stoic boy, who recently finds out more about his sexuality and the mystery surrounding his abrupt withdrawal from the things that makes him manly (a.k.a. Karate) and very attractive to the ladies.

It's like Anna and the French Kiss was injected with some geeky, nerdy steroids, filling it to the brim and that gave birth to Life in Outer Space. Sam certainly isn't French (though Camilla has British accent) but what I mean is, the friendship that Camilla and Sam forged, in between trading movie recommendations from horror movies to obscure masterpieces, late night talks, Warcraft quest, that careful build up of a relationship from friendship to that point where they just realized that the feelings they have for each other are very real, it's just so satisfying to read. It's that same, delicate, funny, happy feeling you get when the relationship between two people comes full circle.

Awfully romantic, downright funny and overall just awesome, Life in Outer Space is a debut you shouldn't miss, and I mean it. This book brings me to my happy place, where I can just laugh out loud and curl up in a corner because of all the feelings I get. Read this book and I dare you to not laugh even once with the geeky, nerdy dialogues, Sam's thoughts and just the way the story unfolds, with lots of misunderstandings, assumings, and the worst plans to solve mysteries concerning a friend. Do I recommend this book? YES!

My rating:

Content (plot, story flow, character):

The geek finally gets the girl. There's a lot of things that just amuses me in this novel. The fact that Sam and his friends were going to the prom, that Sam is getting guitar lessons in possibly the worse moment of his life, that he's punching Adrian in the face and kissing someone he shouldn't. It's a vortex of wonderful, confusing, sometimes angst filled most of the time unknowingly romantic events that makes it so good of a read.

Stunning: Worthy of a Goddess' Praise!

Book Cover:

I must say, it's AMAZING!