Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.

This review contains spoilers.

You’ve probably heard me say this before: I tried to like this book. I really tried. Every aspect of this book were nickels in my gumball machine, and in my excitement, I neglected to note that each ball smelled faintly of feet and armpit sweat before popping them into my mouth for the unfortunate mouthful.

To wit, this book sucked.

The story starts with a plane crash. Emily and her little brother Aidan have stowed away on a cargo plane heading out into the Alaskan bush, and the pilot has no idea they’re inside his cargo hold. Shortly after surviving the crash, Bob, Emily, and Aidan are met with a helicopter and gunfire from government agents. Bob takes a shot in the arm, and the trio use leverage from the broken plane wing to ride down the mountainside like a giant sled. Then it’s a matter of survival in the wilderness and early near-Arctic spring to help Aidan get home. Cuz he’s an alien.

Some added internal tension comes about because Emily caught the boys’ locker room on fire at her school just before she stowed away in Bob’s plane, and we don’t know why. SO! The set up works. It could have been really interesting. Survival stories always get me clenched up in stress, and you throw in dodging bullets, you’ve got me sold. That’s how I ended up requesting this in the first place.

But…sadly, no. A lot of tiny wrenches ended up in the cogs and overwhelmed the works like those tiny bugs on wind turbines.

The characters. The lack of things happening probably wouldn’t have been such an issue if the characters had been more than two dimensional. Emily starts out the story as a girl who doesn’t understand her parents (granted, she’s sixteen), hates that she moved to Alaska, and is not at all happy to have traded ballet for cheerleading. By the way, we’re not given a super solid reason why she can’t go to dance in a different town nearby, or if there’s a dance studio in town…now that I think about it, I don’t even remember the name of the town where she lived. And it definitely doesn’t help that we’re not given a solid idea as to which cardinal direction they head so they can end up in Anchorage.

Anyway.

Emily stays the same. Bob stays the same. Emily’s parents get about as much filling out as a half-price taco. And I’ll get to Aidan later. Oh, will I get to Aidan. One of the things Aidan the alien can do is get living things to protect him by appearing small and helpless, basically a baby in their species. He then implants false memories so that these people/animals don’t question how he’s suddenly appeared. But when Emily’s parents treat him like their child, she feels strangely jealous suddenly, as if they’ve never loved her. And she says a few times that her parents never hug her, but I feel as though that’s inherently untrue, as she has no attachment issues or emotional instability. She’s a perfectly normal teen. And later on, they’re shown to hug her and care for her. Like…make up your mind. Either her parents are neglectful and want nothing for Emily but what they think she should do, or they’re supportive and she’s being dramatic.

I guarantee you, it’s the second one. Because when her parents show up to rescue the trio later on, and they ask her why she ran away, she points out these things: they like a bunch of things that she doesn’t and they make her do them (which yes, they’re her parents, it’s kind of a thing that just happens), she didn’t want to move to Alaska, she didn’t have friends in school, and she doesn’t feel listened to.

Girl. No.

This is where my line fell for Emily. She went from being a flat teenage stereotype to an entitled brat who had no idea how privileged she was. From then on she just sounded more and more whiny, and that didn’t change throughout the rest of the book.

And now, Aidan. Oh, Aidan. We’re told that any creature who sees him has an instinctive need to protect him and keep him safe. We see this with Emily, with Emily’s parents, and with the bear in the forest. Even with Bob. But for some reason the government agents chasing them are immune to this power? And even though Aidan didn’t touch their faces or hands to tell them he’s an alien, they somehow know that he’s an alien? For Emily and Bob to realize what he was, he had to show them his true form, but apparently it wasn’t necessary for the men chasing them into the wilderness to see it because they know what he is.

And why was Aidan so susceptible to the cold? That’s never clarified.

And why does his dialogue fluctuate between “normal kid” and “alien child”?

The thing that bothered me most about Aidan was the trope he became: the perfect problem-solving child. No problem was too big for him to fix. No obstacle stood in his way–when he felt like leaping over it. Most of the book seemed to depend on Aidan’s attitude toward whatever they were facing. And for a book that was nearly 300 pages, nothing much happens.

The plane crashes. The trio heads into the wilderness. There’s an avalanche. They find a cabin and eat stuff. Emily’s parents show up. They make it to Anchorage. They contact Aidan’s family. Aidan leaves. Emily and her family go home. The end…

Except.

EXCEPT.

A glaringly, blatantly impossible plot point is what Emily’s ballet career hinges upon. When she showed Aidan how she danced, they were in the cabin in the wilderness. They had ditched the SPOT tracker that would help locate them. Bob was healing from being shot in the arm, asleep in the cabin. But somehow a video turns up that Bob filmed of Emily dancing by the lake with Aidan.

(Of course, since no one else saw his true form, he’s not in the video and no one can see him. Because of course.)

Bob didn’t have a camera. Bob didn’t have a cell phone. Either the author is just not a good writer, or Bob is a cyborg.

Then we learn why Emily caught the boys’ locker room on fire: a creepy football player hit on her. She said no. He left. She got upset and went to burn his football jersey. The locker room caught on fire (?).

Listen. I never said this book made sense. I warned you it was bad.

Nowhere on Earth tries to be five or six books all at the same time. I get it, unwanted flirting sucks. But guess what. Brad walked away. He didn’t grope her. He didn’t stick his tongue down her throat. If you’re going to make a statement about sexual assault or harassment, maybe don’t squeeze it into a poorly-constructed tale about ET and the Alaskan wilderness. Unfortunately for Nick Lake, I’m currently reading The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis, and have just finished reading both The Grace Year by Kim Liggett and listening to Maybe He Just Likes You by Barbara Dee. Concerning Lake’s attempt at a social message, he done goofed.

On a petty note, the punctuation in this book drove me nuts. In five or so lines that were littered with commas and dashes, we had four colons and a semicolon. This isn’t an academic paper. Prose only ever requires complicated punctuation if you’re either A) Victor Hugo, or B) F. Scott Fitzgerald. And you ain’t, chief. You ain’t. Not even Jane Austen used this many colons and dashes in the span of a page. For anyone wondering, YES, I do have OCD that targets punctuation and its use. And I hate it.

ALSO. STOP BREAKING UP YOUR DIALOGUE WITH ELLIPSES. JUST STOP. It doesn’t effectively indicate a pause, it just makes your writing more stilted and awkward than it needs to be.

Just…I’m so disappointed. This was terrible. I expect more from an author who’s written four or five books. I won’t be reading Nick Lake again.

Nowhere On Earth by Nick Lake was an enjoyable read that I was able to finish in about two days reading time. I loved adventure and survival stories when I was younger, and this one did not disappoint. I was not expecting the curveballs that we were thrown, and I found myself reading because I desperately needed to know what was going to happen - were they going to make it to the facility, was Aidan going to make it home?

There were a few questions that I wish had been resolved, but I think that works for the way this story was shaped. Like Aidan, some things are not knowable. Emily, our main character, read a lot like a teenage girl to me, representing what it was like when it really felt like no one liked you, not even your own parents, even though it's clear to others that they do. She did not always make the wise decisions, couldn't always see past what teenage instincts were telling her, and that was realistic to me. She was not easy to trust the pilot, either. It's frustrating in novels when a character who has no reason to simply immediately trusts a stranger.

I will definitely be recommending this book to teens at my library who want a fun read about family and siblings!

I really enjoyed Nowhere on Earth. It is a great read for teens that focuses on family and friendships over romance. It is full of adventure and so much more than a typical book story of survival.

This one completely confused me..

We are thrown into this mysterious, confusing situation where two siblings are stowaways within a plane crash. They are characters that we don't even know if we can trust, and their reliability is 100% in question. 

From there, the plot continues to get weirder and weirder until finally I was so intrigued I had to finish. 

It's a YA SciFi story that will leave you guessing while also suppling a survival story. The story itself is definitely unique, so I highly recommend going into it blind just as I have. I think that if it wasn't so captivating, that I would have probably DNF'd this a short way through. 

Overall, it was a drawn out book that just took a huge chunk of the book to really know what could be going on. A 3 out of 5 stars.

Actual rating: 4.5 ⭐

You don't need to truly know someone in order to be able to love them. You can love them even when you know their true self is alien to the rest of the world as you know it. This is the feeling that this book let me with.
Usually I write my reviews with PROS and CONS points, unless it's a DNF, but when my mind almost can't make a comprehensive sentence in order to at least try and be able to explain what a book means for me and how it makes me feel, I write it like this: just rambling thoughts picked from the chaos that my mind is.
This book made me feel warm, loved and powerful, the creator of my own feature. Because this book talks in equal measure about love and about feature, as it talks about hate and past and present. This book it's having an imposibile shape, like Aidan's ship, but once you get to know it, to see it as what it is, you can appreciate it at it's right value. Because this book is a little, single alien on an Earth full of humanly ones.
Your journey with it it will be full of curiosity, fear, questions, love, decisions, power, fight, loyalty and impossibility. Or maybe not. But I encourage you to take your time with this book and discover it piece by piece, word by word. Because nowhere on Earth you will find a book like this one.

First of all, I love this cover!! The one on Goodreads is different, but I find this one more appealing even if the other seems more relevant to the story. I found the story to be okay. Good premise though.

The beginning and especially the dialogues at the beginning felt a lot like a young teens/ children book kind of writing style, but once you were further into the book, it got better! The descriptions of the surroundings and actions were pretty precise and interesting, because a lot of the time the author used comparisons I would have never thought of but were very accurate.
There were some action packed scenes, but for me personally, there could have been more stuff going on.
The ending was really interesting, especially the time/ making your future concept was awesome and it started an interesting thought process!

Nowhere on Earth is one part sci-fi, one part adventure story. I really enjoyed this story of survival - both against the elements and against the bad guys. Rugged terrain and the beauty of an icy Alaska backdrop brings a sense of harshness and danger to the story, while the mystery of Emily’s past and who and what exactly Aidan is, draws the reader in.

Emily is on a mission to save her brother. They have snuck aboard a plane heading from nowhere Alaska to Anchorage. Emily has been wanting to escape since her parents dragged her to Alaska and away from her friends and ballet, wanting also to escape the trouble she is in at school. But when the plane crashes, she, Aidan and the pilot must depend on each other to survive. Emily will do anything to protect Aidan, even if it means fighting off the men who come after them. Because Aidan isn’t from Earth and they want to prevent him from being able to go home.

It’s funny, the fact that there are aliens, spaceships and ‘people’ from another planet is almost a side story in this book, one that isn’t overly explored. Details of how or why or what aren’t explored. If you want to know everything about the aliens, where they come from, what they want, how their technology works or where they live, you won’t find it in this book. Emily readily accepts that Aidan is from another planet, though his spaceship is kind of hard to dispute.

We join Aidan and Emily after the plane crash, so her finding him and his spaceship, him joining her family, and their decision to flee is all filled in as backstory. It works, as it places the focus of the story on Emily and Aidan’s survival as they navigate the plane wreckage, trying to make the journey on foot and out running the bad guys.

Emily is awesome. She is a dancer, but as her parents’ daughter she can shoot, hunt and hike. And she’s not afraid to stand up for herself. She’s the perfect character to survive a plane crash in the middle of the snowy wilderness. As we learn about what happened to cause the trouble at school it becomes clearer show strong she is. Then she takes out the bad guys and gets Aidan, Bob the pilot and herself down the mountain on the plane wing!! She is clever, strong and doesn’t back down from a fight.

Nowhere on Earth was and yet wasn’t what I was expecting. The story of adventure and survival ticked all the boxes for me and I loved the strength of Emily. The bits about aliens and Aidan were curveballs I wasn’t sure what to do with. It works for the flow of the story, so long as you are okay with not learning more. And I think the details we do receive make the story of Emily’s past, her relationship with her family and facing her demons that much more important.

The publishers provided an advanced readers copy of this book for reviewing purposes. All opinions are my own.

For some reason, this book just didn't click with me. I'm pretty picky, I guess. I'm not even sure what it was about it that didn't resonate. It's absolutely a great book, just not for me.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4

This was a nice enough story about miscommunications in family & coming of age in the woods and through physical adversity but I just wasn’t sucked in as much as I could’ve been.

I thought I’d feel a lot more protective towards Aiden but I didn’t!

Overall though, good for contemporary sci-fi fans & it’s an easy read so doesn’t take too long to read but is 352 pages which is good.

Emily is 16 and a stowaway on a plane that just crashed in the wilderness of Alaska. What follows is a wild and intense story about a girl on the run to save an alien boy whom she calls her brother from the “men in black”.

I liked that the story picks up in the middle of the action and weaves the story of how we got to that point in among the plot. It is pretty intense in terms of the survival aspects as I’m sure you can imagine when it comes to a survival story in the wilderness of Alaska running from the government. There is one pretty graphic scene involving a dying animal, so if that’s something sensitive for you, definitely skip it. This was a fast paced story that kept my attention pretty easily, but it still just felt like it was missing that special something that would have made it something memorable.

This story was absolute perfection! I really enjoyed it. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this book delivered so much. It had tense action scenes, tear filled family connections, drama, and so much heart. If you want a book that reminds you of what it means to be human, pick this up. Four stars!

This book is like E.T. meets Hatchet. A quick, adrenaline fueled mission between a girl and an alien and what it means to find home. Best for grades 4-6 or readers who enjoy sci-fi/fantasy genres. Thanks for the free copy in exchange for my honest opinion. My 7th grader enjoyed the opportunity to read this galley during quarantine!

4.5/5

I received this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a wild ride!! After like the first two chapters, I was hooked. And the chapters are so short, which was kind of a relief since the book before had ridiculously long chapters.

It starts with a plane crash. There are survivors: a teenage girl and her little brother. They are running from something. But what? Then the men arrive. They are hunting the girl and boy.

Emily was a great character, I loved her spunk and quick wit immediately. Aidan, her younger brother, was very interesting and the relationship between these two was so heart warming and poignant. I seriously loved them so much.

This a quick, action-adventure survival tale. On the run from an unknown threat, Emily is determined to get her younger brother to somewhere safe. This is made much harder when the plane pilot, Bob, becomes injured in their escape from the plane crash.

The story made so many good points, and had so many overarching themes that I loved. The main two where family and living in the present. Overall: really quick and fun read that I loved.

I requested a copy of this book because I was really intrigued by the plot. You know those books where you don't really connect immediately when you pick it up, but once it grows on you, it sticks. This is that book! You have to be patient since the pacing is slow, but you will enjoy the ride once you're done.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children's Books for approving my request to read an early copy of Nowhere on Earth in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you so much to net galley for sending me a copy of this book. I really enjoyed this action packed book. It starts with a plane crash and goes from there. Who recommend to like minded readers

Even if the plot reminded me of other books I read it was an engrossing and entertaining read.
A well thought cast of characters, a plot that flows and an interesting world building makes this story a good read.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I especially loved Aidan as the alien boy who was able to change peoples lives in a good way.

This book is everything and more.
It's a weird one, at first. Yet, I was not able to put it down.

Nowhere on Earth centres around a teenaged girl, Emily, and her not-really-brother Aidan. Aidan who - as it turns out - is not human and who needs to send a message into space to get back to his people. There are some obvious ET-Referances that even the book itself acknowledges, but it is also so, so much more than that.

It's a story about unconditional (non-romantic!) love, about growing up and becoming the person you want to become. It's about standing up for what you believe in and about what it means to be human.

While I loved everything about this book I think it needs to be mentioned that the writing would have been more fitting for a middle-grade book, rather than YA. That is my only complaint, however, as I really did enjoy everything else.

It's rather untypical for YA literature to not have any sort of romance in there. I was pleasantly surprised that there was so much love in this book - all of it non-romantic. There is the love between Emily and Aiden. They may not be siblings, but they love each other nonetheless. There is nothing Emily wouldn't do for Aiden and vice versa. Theirs is just pure, wholesome love.
Then there is the love between Emily and her parents. As a typical teenager, she struggles with the difference between what her parents want and what she wants. I enjoyed how Nick Lake brought her parents into the plot to help their daughter. This family is an absolute dream-team and if they wanted I'm sure they could take over the world.

The thing that shook me the most, was the 'gift' Aiden gave her before he left. I'll admit it took me a second to understand it but once I did, it hit me. Hard.
The past was always there. Aidan would never be gone.
I don't really know why, but this hit me right in the feels. It is a very calming thought and one I plan to hold on to.

I think the ending was one of the strongest aspects of the book. It wrapped everything up, Emily grew up, she has opportunities to take and all of that with a very strong support system (her parents) to help her through it.

Nowhere on Earth is a riveting though it may seem a bit simple at first glance, it is actually anything but and will leave the reader to marvel about it for days, if not weeks.


Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children's Books for the opportunity to read Nowhere on Earth in exchange for an honest review.

“Stories are powerful things. People look for them, even when they don't exist.”

representation: MC has Salvadoran heritage.

[trigger warnings are listed at the bottom of this review and may contain spoilers]

This was super intriguing and fast paced! We're thrown right into the action from the get go and all we really know is that a girl and her 'brother' are on the run after being in a plane crash. The writing is super simple with a few memorable quotes sprinkled in, but overall it was a really easy & fast read even if I wanted the writing to be a bit more sophisticated!
I didn't expect there to be a little discussion on sexual harassment, but it definitely added more meaning and backstory to the main character's story.

If you're looking for a fast-paced survival story with a hint of sci-fi, this is the book for you! While I enjoyed it and sped through it, it wasn't super memorable for me though, so 3 stars it is!

trigger warnings: plane crash, fire, sexual harassment, guns, gun wounds, gore, animal death (wild animals only).

Thanks so much to NetGalley & Random House Children's for the e-arc!