Henry Denton is struggling with grief and guilt over his boyfriend Jesse’s suicide the previous year. Henry also has a history of being abducted and released by aliens, and recently those aliens have given him a choice: press a button and save all humanity or let life on earth perish. As the calendar counts down toward the day when he will have to make a decision, Henry is looking for reasons to save his fellow humans but coming up short. His grief is compounded by intensified bullying at school, where he is known as “Space Boy”; a secret sexual relationship with a closeted classmate whose actions can be cruel; and difficult relationships at home. Then new kid Diego Vega offers Henry friendship that gradually blossoms into romance, challenging Henry’s perspective on everything from his own self-worth to the ability of humans to rise above the grittiness and hateful things we sometimes inflict on one another. The big ideas Henry contemplates as well as his rough emotional state are balanced by his sharply funny voice, while the complexity of the primary and secondary characters and their relationships adds to the texture of this mature work. (Age 14 and older)

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021)

From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes a brand-new novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.

Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.

Only he isn’t sure he wants to.

After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.

Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.

But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.