B Schrodinger's Reviews > The Humans

** spoiler alert ** Firstly, I could not finish this. Although I did not hate the book there were too many aspects of the story that just annoyed me no end.

"The Humans" is the story of an alien who is sent to Earth to eliminate all traces of the newly found proof of the Reimann hypothesis, which is said to be too powerful and dangerous knowledge for an immature species as us. The alien possesses the mathematician who proves the hypothesis, a professor at a prestigious university, who is also having a lot of family problems. Good premise, but you can see where it is heading.

My main problems with this book come down to the suspension of disbelief and the constant attempts at being witty and quirky. The plot is only a facade for looking at humanity from a differing perspective, and despite what many would say in other reviews, it's not unique and it's not a revelation.

In my previous edit, I had a large pick at the scientific inaccuracies. And while they are quite valid and something that the author could have rectified easily, each is not much of a problem. There are plenty of books with wildly bad science that get away with it. It's just the pure number of them (and a little bit of me felt the author was trying to be clever by attempting to use science too) constantly jarred me. When you are rolling your eyes at the book you are reading every few pages, suspension of disbelief goes out the window.

On one page the alien was a naive blank slate, the next he had some prior knowledge suddenly, the next he was using keys with no problem. The alien main character only seemed to be naive or uninformed at the convenience of the author to make some glib observation, not to drive the plot and not in a consistent manner with the premise.

With all these inconsistencies and problems, I found it hard to read this clichéd and predictable story. I found the that the humour and wit of this book came down to the same inane memes that your aunt will share on Facebook: I hate Mondays humour, only my dog understands me humour, kids these days humour. The philosophical, worldly observations were as deep as those given on a motivational calendar.
It's a Hallmark book.

EDIT: I edited this review because a lot of other reviewers were critical of it. And while they'll always feel a need to write a remark about how I didn't understand some crucial plot point in the book, I do agree that my original review was much snarkier and less constructive than it should be. And I have the image of Matt Haig reading this and I want it to be as constructive as possible.