Wow, does this start out insanely well! The introduction, titled "the story", is seventeen pages of pure undistilled perfection. It's friendly, like a primary school teacher passing on bad news. It's as easy as prose gets, utterly effortless, whatever work Seanan McGuire, who's hardly hiding behind what has become her most frequently used pseudonym, put into it. However, there are at least a dozen moments of absolute magic, taking us all the way from birth to death to rebirth, following in nature documentary detail an alien mission that arrives unseen and then introducing us to the lead character as a child who goes missing but then finds herself. Well, kinda sorta.

She's Anastasia Miller, or least she used to be. Up until the age of three, she was Anastasia Miller. After she encountered a large and weird looking alien flower in the woods behind the house, she was devoured and reconstructed down to the tiniest detail as an alien plant creature, part of the vanguard for an invasion that will arrive Real Soon Now. She isn't hiding it either. She has what is practically a compunction to tell everyone she meets that she's really an alien plant creature but nobody ever believes her. And that invasion consistently doesn't arrive.

And so we fast forward. She was in kindergarten in 2002. Now it's 2031 and she's working in Seattle at a call centre. While the world doesn't know it yet, that invasion is twenty-five days away. It's at this point that we leap into first person and let Stasia tell this story, which is bad because I would have listened to that introductory voice forever, but good because she's a fantastic narrator too, full of life and the sort of observation that McGuire can throw out like confetti and other writers want to kill her for how easy it doesn't come to them. "Being the vanguard of an invading species of alien plant people doesn't get me special privileges on the bus." That's how to start a chapter.

Frankly, I'd read this novel by practically anybody because it's a glorious idea, but this is McGuire and there aren't many authors who can tackle what it means to be human better than her in 2026. In particular, no other author can nail what it means to be different like McGuire. It's a common theme throughout most of her work, albeit most obviously in her 'Wayward Children' series, but it's all over this one too like a rash. If there's a flaw, it's that the normal people are kept perhaps too far away from focus. They're either the bad guys who think they're good guys or they're over in the background affecting things without us paying much attention to them.

Stasia is an alien plant creature, even if nobody believes it, and, as the book progresses, of course we meet more such. The first is Jeff, who's a little more hardcore about it. She meets him first in the forest, a sort of shared space she visits in her dreams, but the next day he's all over her phone and it isn't long after that before she meets him in person. Toni, who's really Antonia Fabris but is known to the public as Dr. Anthony Vornholt, the astronomer who first shared the incoming alien signal to the planet. She was almost one of them when she sniffed a flower as a child but she was able to pull away and merely lose some skin. She delivers wonderfully honest dialogue and serves as a very effective Greek chorus all on her own. And she "likes her own skin better than her high horse." So many zingers.

There are plenty of humans too, but they're not particularly mainstream. Stasia's boyfriend is Dr. Graham Fordham, who's a trans male herpetologist. She has always accepted him absolutely and he, even after the odds are seriously raised, accepts her absolutely too. It's a perfect romance in an awkward situation to end all awkward situations. The best line of the book—and there's hardly a shortage of strong lines—comes almost as an aside. It's in reference to both Stasia and Graham and the fact that neither occupies a body that looks how it should to them, but it plays very nicely as a reminder that true humanity isn't necessarily what we might think it looks like.

That line, by the way, is this one, as spoken by Stasia: "But they hadn't laughed at me; because me claiming to be an alien who looked like their idea of a woman was more reasonable to them than Graham claiming to be a man who looked like their idea of a woman." That's a line to remember. And, if you have enough skin, it's a line you might want to get tattooed on your body. It's a peach of a line that echoes down through this book, especially after the invasion begins and the human race collectively asks itself a heck of a lot of questions.

Other humans include Mandy and Lucas, who are Stasia's roommates back in Seattle. Mandy is an impeccably good friend, even given the circumstances. Lucas tries to be and often succeeds, but the circumstance this is, well, maybe it's too much. If we're looking for a reasonable response from the human race, it's in them far more than it's in the agent who plucks them off the plane in Tucson, a heck of a diversion for one travelling from Maine to Washington state. She's an outright villain in spite of who she works for and there are others, albeit not as many as perhaps there should have been, in between her mindset and that of Lucas.

That's a complaint but it's not a huge one. I've seen some critics complaining about how the pace changes when the invasion arrives. They're not entirely wrong but I think they're coming from an awkward perspective. Maybe they've watched 'Independence Day' a few too many times and see a story like this inevitably turning from overwhelming alien odds to mankind pulling a neat trick to save the day like connecting Jeff Goldblum's Macbook to an alien WAN server mainframe (or what buzzwords the cool kids with no understanding of IT are using nowadays) and uploading a software virus to explode everybody who ain't from around here. That's Hollywood. This is reality.

These aliens are alien, even if the vanguard, rather deliberately, looks like us. Their tech is alien, most if not all of it being organic, and their goals and culture and general frickin' outlook are also alien. Grant does a pretty good job of translating it into terms we might understand, which is not the trivial task it might seem, not in something that has this depth of substance. It surely helps a great deal that she's so good at seeing what makes humans human. Once she has that, it ought to be easier to flip it and see what makes aliens alien.

She does resort to a few pop culture reference points. Stasia herself, because she has a sense of humour, even as an alien plant creature, brings in Seymour and Audrey II from 'The Little Shop of Horrors' pretty early, but it's not long before she adds 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' and 'The Midwich Cuckoos'. I'm actually surprised she went with that before 'The Day of the Triffids', but I can't say she's wrong. It just reminds me that I really ought to read John Wyndham. They're all on the shelf and, while I wasn't ready when I was eleven, I'm surely long since ready now.

'Overgrowth' isn't as consistently good all the way through as it starts out but then nothing is as good as this starts out, not without winning multiple awards. This is very good and I enjoyed it all immensely. It's a little daunting, because it's about alien plant creatures and boasts a page count that scoots past four-hundred and fifty. However, I read this in two almost breathless sessions. It's not a slow burner. It's impeccably accessible and, however long it takes to get to the actual alien invasion already, it's not really that long. The pace is strong until humanity walks into a brick wall and then it seems fair to me that it stumbles a little. It does so for very good reasons.

Oddly, given how many of Seanan McGuire's books I've read and how often I've bumped into her at conventions, this is the first of them with Mira Grant on the cover that I've actually read. I have a whole lot more ready to go and really need to dive into them, because I want to wrap up a zine on her first however many, in publication order, but priorities keep bumping them down the road. I'd think this should help, though, because if she's writing Mira Grant books this thick but which read this quickly, then her 'Newsflesh' books presumably aren't as daunting as they may seem. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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