BOOK TALK: The True Meaning of Smekday

I always like jumping in to a new book that has a lot of fun ideas and excellent execution of them. When I really start enjoying such books, time seems to fly and I blaze through them at a voracious rate (at least for me). When doing the reverse, reading a book that I do not enjoy, I tend to move through them at a pace not unlike a sloth, growing moss in between my turning of every page.

The former is definitely the case here with The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex!

For those who want to get a rough ‘feel’ for the kind of book this is, here is the synopsis from Amazon:

“It all starts with a school essay.

When twelve-year-old Gratuity ("Tip") Tucci is assigned to write five pages on "The True Meaning of Smekday" for the National Time Capsule contest, she's not sure where to begin. When her mom started telling everyone about the messages aliens were sending through a mole on the back of her neck? Maybe on Christmas Eve, when huge, bizarre spaceships descended on the Earth and the aliens-called Boov-abducted her mother? Or when the Boov declared Earth a colony, renamed it "Smekland" (in honor of glorious Captain Smek), and forced all Americans to relocate to Florida via rocketpod?

In any case, Gratuity's story is much, much bigger than the assignment. It involves her unlikely friendship with a renegade Boov mechanic named J.Lo.; a futile journey south to find Gratuity's mother at the Happy Mouse Kingdom; a cross-country road trip in a hovercar called Slushious; and an outrageous plan to save the Earth from yet another alien invasion.”

This book was not only fun to read, it was also filled with interesting concepts and different ways of telling a story. One of the more endearing traits of the book is the selection of photographs (drawings) given throughout of all the sights and strange people that Gratuity meets, showing just how much the planet has changed and NOT changed. It was also truly funny, with many laugh-out-loud moments that feel absolutely natural for the world that we’re presented with. There are just so many fun quotes that could be pulled out of the text, many of them from the alien character, J.Lo, but I don’t want to spoil the discovery of them.

The fantastic thing about the whole journey of this book, however, is that none of the content feels ‘forced’.

Everything is presented through the eyes of the main character and we’re given her insight on many things in the world, but we’re not force-fed what we’re supposed to take away from the story. Gratuity herself even talks to the audience about how she isn’t sure of the moral of the story that she’s telling, but only that she has to tell it.

I want to end this discussion right here to tell folks to give this book a read, but I would be remiss if I didn’t give a little more in-depth discussion on some of the things presented in this book. For those who don’t want some aspects of the story inevitably spoiled, don’t look any further!

Of COURSE my first ever 'selfie' is with an alien. Wasn't yours?

The Anthro Element

Before anybody asks, no, there are no talking animals in this book. However, there ARE talking, sentient, non-human lifeforms, and that makes them no less anthropomorphic than Mickey Mouse. In fact, the aliens in this book, known as the Boov, are perfect examples of many of the concepts we’ve talked about with anthropomorphic characters and ideas.

The Boov spend the majority of the book trying to understand human beings, or at least try to figure out how they can build a society around them. There are a lot of parallels to the conquest and discovery of America, right down to the Boov renaming earth and its people after the captain who ‘discovered’ the world. The story draws even clearer lines by moving all of the people in America to a single state, greatly reducing the amount of land that they used to own. It sort of reaches its peak when Gratuity finds a large number of well-off Americans living in casinos, but I think it’s almost a joke for the observant reader by that point, as the plot was focusing more on threats to the world rather than America being ‘occupied.’

The Boov are most definitely fascinating to look at from an anthro perspective, though. Not only do they look radically different from human beings, but their diets and the values they consider to be important are completely different as well. As the story goes on, we learn more and more about the Boov values, eventually even getting an entire origin story for the species and how they started space-faring. This is all presented to Gratuity, who is young enough that her view of the world is a very open one, and so we get a lot of her asking questions and trying to present the values of humans in comparison to the Boov. It ends up being not only funny, but also a great period of character building for both her and her new friend J.Lo. J.Lo starts to take on and understand human values like the connection between a mother and a daughter (his people are born from eggs and relatively abandoned by their biological mothers), and Gratuity starts to see through some of the initial fears and prejudices they all had about the Boov.

As this book concerns itself so much with how the different species on Smekland/Earthland interact and communicate, I think it’s an absolutely ideal piece of anthropomorphic fiction.

Quibbles

Of course, The True Meaning of Smekland is not a perfect book. As I mentioned above, some might find the parallels between the conquest of the Boov and the conquest of the Americas to be a little too heavy-handed. While I feel they are well-handled in general, there is most definitely a bit of bias towards Native Americans, as the only Native American in the entire book is also the only adult that isn’t absolutely loony and useless to most of Gratuity’s needs.

Speaking of adults, the way adults are handled in this book is also a little grating at times. While the tone IS consistent, it does get a little frustrating to frequently see an adult appear in Gratuity’s path and discover that they are yet another childishly-minded and selfish individual. To be fair, though, most of the kids she encounters are just as bad, so it’s more of a case of the world going mad and probably less of a direct bias against adults.

Despite these nitpicks, the story is still fantastic and has a brisk, lively pace that feels good and satisfying to read. The pictures are all well-done and the world-building is amazing, considering that the story is on a world that one would assume to already know fairly well.

Seriously, the art in this book is incredible! There's tons of it!

And, like many good Middle-Grade novels, The True Meaning of Smekday is already slated for a film adaptation! I didn’t know this until about halfway through the book, so I’m filled with both anxiety and excitement. If you’ve ever read and enjoyed a book before seeing the movie announcement, you’ll probably know what I mean.

The movie is going to be called “Home” and you can find teaser trailers for it online as of this posting. Go ahead and check it out, and see if you can finish the book before the movie comes out and creates a blockbuster rush for copies!

For next month, we’re going to be trying a bit of a topic that I’ve been wanting to present on this blog for quite a while: Anthropomorphic Graphic Novels and Comics. If you love good art and stories together, be sure to keep a look out! I’ll be pointing out my favorites and looking to discover new ones.

Until next time, happy reading, all!

-Chammy