A UFO writes a cryptic message in the sky above the homes of two suburban couples, Amy and Jim Clinton and Cherise and Tommy Trump. (The surnames seem gratuitously jokey and, unfortunately, set the tone for the rest of the book.) The four neighbors' lives are changed. Amy becomes obsessed, having her husband create a website for her and hiring a skywriter to duplicate the message, either as a sign to the "aliens" that she has seen them or to let other people know something has happened. Jim refuses to believe that anything significant has happened, but begins to experience mysterious nocturnal abductions. Tommy worries that the aliens will disaprove of his meat-eating, so he becomes a vegetarian. Cher starts "meditating" and buys expensive alien sculptures created by a woman who claims to be channeling an alien known as "Zeta." (Cher's "meditation" consists of sending her wishes out into the universe and she seems to believe that whether or not she gets what she wants is dependent upon the style, fit, and cost of her yoga pants.) With the possible exceptions of the man who does remote viewing for the Air Force, a Lyft driver who believes she has been abducted and lives in abject terror, and the crop-duster who is just earning a living, none of the characters are motivated by anything beyond greed, vanity, lust, or boredom.
The main problem with this book is that none of the characters are at all engaging. Amy and Cher, in particular, are shallow, stupid, and manipulative, as evidenced by the seemingly endless descriptions of them offering sex to their husbands as a bribe to get them to do or buy things they want. Jim starts out as the most level-headed of the bunch, but even he eventually deteriorates into something ugly. There are numerous sections, which seem to be the thoughts of an unidentified thinker, on the political, religious, historical, and social effects of the UFO phenomenon upon everyone.
Either the author thinks people are just really foolish and contemptible or he is trying to be satirical. If so, he failed. Message in the Sky is not funny.
Honestly, if I did not feel a responsibility to review a book I received from NetGalley, I would have quit this one early. My Kindle copy was so badly formatted that I had to disassemble many paragraphs and then reassemble them for myself in a way that made some grammatical (if not logical) sense. (As this is my first NetGalley book, I don't know whether or not this is the usual experience. I really hope that the print version is more carefully edited.) I gave two stars because I was able to finish the book, but when I got to the end, I realized it was pointless.