What to read this weekend: An alien invasion as told by a body snatcher

Usually when aliens invade and start doing the whole body snatching thing, they don’t go around telling everyone about it. Anastasia, aka Stasia, Miller seems to have missed that memo. The main character of Mira Grant’s Overgrowth is an infiltrator from a race of plant-like aliens who came to Earth as a seed, stole the body of 3-year-old Anastasia and has been living as her ever since. And that’s pretty much how she introduces herself to everyone she meets. Most people don’t believe her, and she lives a relatively normal life. She grows up to be somewhat awkward and, fittingly, is obsessed with Little Shop of Horrors, but has a couple of good friends, a supportive partner and a pet cat (Seymour, of course), who she adores. Aliens, they’re just like us.

Everything is flipped on its head when a scientist detects an extraterrestrial signal and Stasia recognizes it as the sign that her people have finally come to launch the full-scale invasion she’s always been warning of. Overgrowth is a thrilling sci-fi horror story that’s also at times lighthearted and funny. It hooked me right away and I was glad it’s almost 500 pages long, because I didn’t want to put it down.