ARC reviewed by Jessica for Book Sake.

I had high hopes with this book, mostly due to the comparison to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the subject matter of music and aliens. These aliens, lots of them, have been pirating Earth’s music, lots of it. Now they realize that they owe us more money than they have and some of them want to destroy Earth to stay out of bankruptcy.

The author, Rob Reid, is the genius behind Listen.com, which in turn made Rhapsody – so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to pirated music. There are tons of clever quips and mentions of bands and artists from the 1970’s on – most of which I was familiar with. Unfortunately none of the quips throughout the book made me laugh, chuckle, snort, or even smile.

I’ll give it that there were “funny-ish” moments, but I was hoping for more intelligence with the humor. Especially considering how intelligent and well written the idea behind this legally involved plot was. This is what earns it 3/5 instead of lower in my mind.

[(This portion may only apply to the ARC eBook version I had as another reader let me know that the version they have works fine with scanning back and forth with the footnotes.) Do not, I repeat, do not read this in a digital format. Ugh, the footnotes. Each chapter has several footnotes and many are quite lengthy. If I clicked the link to go to the footnote, then I had to swipe my way to get back to where I was in the chapter, and with multiple footnotes in each chapter that was too annoying and time consuming. If I waited until the end of the chapter to read the footnote I often forgot what each one was referring to. If you are going to pick this up – do yourself a favor and get a print copy for this reason alone.]