Starred review from June 1, 2016
At the heart of Franklin's surreal and genre-defying debut novel lie existential questions about life and what we hold dear. He effectively delivers these moral dilemmas through a quirky set of characters who might as well pass for the Pritchetts on television's Modern Family. Life could hardly get any more bizarre for Sandeep Sanghavithe biracial son of an Indian hotelier businesswoman, Elizabeth, and a self-centered astronomer, Van, as he watches his family's illustrious hotel business decay while battling mysterious health concerns and nurturing a crush on his distant cousin, Ursula. To make matters worse, an alien, Randolph, wants to go home to his mother planet and keeps texting Sandeep because he needs Van, who has discovered this planet, to help. Franklin renders many scenes of suspended animation achingly well: the closing of many of their hotels, waiting at airport lounges trapped in limbo between time zones, the desperate search for an elusive planet. This is what being is: an existence, a created crater. We all just simply go away and our gravity disappears, Sandeep realizes. Franklin's fresh and reflective tale movingly shows that what we make of that created crater, and how, just might be the point of it all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)