DNF at 30%

What worked: the premise is what drew me to this book. A 15-year-old girl feels excluded from the male-dominated coding club at her high school and somehow accidentally winds up in the midst of projects involving SETI, the DOD, and decoding extraterrestrial signals. The story is interesting. I'm hoping there are eventually Elvis Ninja Robots as the title suggests, but alas, I didn't make it that far.

But I'm going to be very honest: this books needs to be read by a professional editor before publication, both for stylistic editing (the prose and dialogue are awkward) and proofreading to correct numerous grammatical errors. Copyediting is also needed. The writing is why I could not continue reading this book.

In addition, even in the first 30% that I read, several plot points struck me as too absurdly unrealistic even for a fiction story. For example, there is no way that a brilliant high school student working on an elite-level coding project would think that "Green Bank Observatory" was the name of a literal bank rather than an observatory. Similarly, I find it hard to believe that government agents would have to google words from the NATO alphabet (Tango, Juliett [misspelled in the story], Foxtrot).

I imagine that younger readers may be more likely to overlook the writing issues and enjoy this book purely for the story. Once edited, I think this would be a good fit for middle-grades readers, as the content and the complex sentence structure would be beyond most elementary readers.

In fairness to authors, I don't assign star ratings to reviews on external sites when I have not completed a book. NetGalley requires a star rating, though.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC.

DNF.

It's a great title, and that's what drew me in initially. But the simplistic narrative style, combined with an almost complete lack of the past perfect tense and most of the other usual mechanical issues, made for a book that failed to grip me enough to stick with it.

The protagonist is, at least, a believable teenager (won't clean her room, secretive, rebellious, deals with issues by ignoring them until she can't any longer). Whether she's also believable as the one person in the world who's a good enough puzzle solver to decode alien transmissions... I didn't get far enough to decide.