When the Sky Fell on Splendor

To be very honest, I was initially drawn to When the Sky Fell on Splendor because it has a UFO on the cover. I like stories about people who find meaning in shooting stars and strange lights in the night sky—but I also love stories about found families, and it was the characters who brought this novel to life for me.

The book focuses on a teenager named Franny and her group of friends, all of whom are pushing at the seams of small-town life while dealing with the effects of an unthinkable tragedy that struck their town years before. They call themselves The Ordinary, and they play at being ghosthunters on YouTube to stay entertained. At the start of the book, they witness a bonafide supernatural event that sends them on a high-stakes search for answers, dealing with men in black and psychic powers—not to mention their summer jobs—as tensions rise among the friends.

While there’s a mystery that keeps you guessing and an action-packed climax, the heart of this novel is the people who make up The Ordinary, lonely teenagers drawn together by loss. Emily Henry expertly articulates what it means to live with grief: to survive a tragedy and deal with what comes next. This is a sci-fi novel that is as nuanced as it is exciting, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Almost everyone in the small town of Splendor, Ohio, was affected when the local steel mill exploded. If you weren’t a casualty of the accident yourself, chances are a loved one was. That’s the case for seventeen-year-old Franny, who, five years after the explosion, still has to stand by and do nothing as her brother lies in a coma.

In the wake of the tragedy, Franny found solace in a group of friends whose experiences mirrored her own. The group calls themselves The Ordinary, and they spend their free time investigating local ghost stories and legends, filming their exploits for their small following of YouTube fans. It’s silly, it’s fun, and it keeps them from dwelling on the sadness that surrounds them.

Until one evening, when the strange and dangerous thing they film isn’t fiction—it’s a bright light, something massive hurdling toward them from the sky. And when it crashes and the teens go to investigate ... everything changes.