Life Hacks for a Little Alien

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Life Hacks for a Little Alien by Alice Franklin is a thoughtful and quietly devastating story about a neurodivergent girl trying to make sense of a world that rarely makes sense back. It’s written in second person, technically, but not in the usual immersive way where you’re cast as the protagonist. This feels more like someone watching the girl and gently trying to explain the world to her… or explaining her to herself. I started calling it “2.5 person” (second-and-a-half person) in my notes because I’ve been playing some “2.5D” platformer games recently. Maybe “distanced second-person” would be more accurate?

The story opens with the unnamed girl spooning yogurt onto a spider on the living room rug, which also spurs her first words. This makes her mother a little nervous, to the point she starts wondering if her child might be a psychopath. When the girl starts school, it quickly becomes clear that things aren’t going well. She’s incredibly bright but struggles with communication, and the adults around her like the teachers and her family don’t seem to know how to support her.

The teachers ultimately seem disinterested to the point of criminal negligence, both with the school as it’s literally falling to pieces and their apparent disdain and indifference towards many of the children in their care. The girl believes she is, in fact, an alien because she doesn’t seem to fit in. She tries her best to navigate social expectations she doesn’t understand, while also trying to process her own inner world.

For a while, the book tracks these struggles in a slice-of-life way, just moving through the years as she copes, or doesn’t cope, with each new challenge. In her early teens, there’s a sharp shift in focus when she becomes obsessed with the Voynich manuscript, a real-world medieval text famous for being unreadable. It becomes her whole world, and while the tonal shift is abrupt, I think I get what Franklin’s doing. Unless I missed the mark, it’s showing how a singular special interest can become both a comfort and a coping mechanism. It makes sense, even if it takes over the narrative a bit.

Another pivot comes later as the story shifts to focus on her family life, particularly her mum’s mental health struggles. Her mother has been dealing with these issues for most of the girl’s life, but things seem to worsen as the girl gets older. It doesn’t feel like the girl is the cause of it, exactly, but it’s clear that her autism (misunderstood and unsupported) adds extra strain to an already fragile situation.

These shifts in focus make the book feel more like a series of loosely connected fragments than a neatly structured arc. But maybe that’s the point. This isn’t a story about “overcoming” or finding tidy resolutions. It’s just about being, and surviving, and trying to figure out how to be a person in a world that doesn’t always help you do that.

The narration by Sally Phillips was mostly solid, though I noticed a few background clicks and shuffling-type noises here and there. Nothing that broke the book, but it happened enough times I made a note of it. Otherwise I think she suited the story well.

This one’s a bit hard to sum up. It’s emotionally affecting in places, deeply frustrating in others. I found myself wanting to yell at the teachers more than once for how little care or understanding they showed. But what really stood out was getting to see the world through the eyes and mind of an autistic child.

As a father to two wonderful girls also on the spectrum, it definitely hit home at times. It’s not always an easy listen, but it’s a powerful one, and I’m glad I spent time with it, and one I’ll be revisiting again in the future.

---

Note: These are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you decide to sign up. It doesn't cost you anything extra, and it helps support our site! ♥