Neon Green
A Novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
It's the summer of 1994 in suburban Chicago: Forrest Gump is still in theaters, teens are reeling from the recent death of Kurt Cobain, and you can enter a sweepstakes for a spaceship from Jupiter to land in your backyard. Welcome to Margaret Wappler's slightly altered 90s. Everything's pretty much the way you remember it, except for the aliens.
When a flying saucer lands in the Allens' backyard, family patriarch and environmental activist Ernest is up in arms. According to the company facilitating the visits, the spaceship is 100 percent non-toxic, but as Ernest's panic increases, so do his questions: What are the effects of longterm exposure to the saucer and why is it really here?
The family starts logging the spaceship’s daily fits and starts but it doesn't get them any closer to figuring out the spaceship's comically erratic behavior. Ernest’s wife Cynthia and their children, Alison and Gabe, are less concerned with the saucer, and more worried about their father’s growing paranoia (not to mention their mundane, suburban existences). Set before the arrival of the internet, Neon Green will stun, unnerve, and charm readers with its loving depiction of a suburban family living on the cusp of the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prairie Park, Ill., in 1994 is a cultivated suburb of Chicago. It's middle-class, clean, and homogeneous, a place where Ernest and Cynthia Allen and their kids, Gabe and Alison, can live nice, normal, environmentally conscious lives. They have friendly neighbors, clean streets, and Aurora Park, a beautiful slice of outdoors. In Wappler's quirky alternate history debut, this normalcy makes a space ship landing in the Allens' backyard all the more foreign. Gabe entered a contest for a visit from Jupiter, but not all of the Allens feel like lucky winners. Gabe thinks it's a hoot, but for Ernest, a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist, the ship is anathema. When it starts spewing neon green concoctions onto his lawn, Ernest begins a one-man war of wills to have it removed. Wappler's examination of the world through this one family is well written but ultimately melancholic with no resolution.
