Your Alien

It’s best-friendship at first contact after a flying saucer crashes outside a boy’s house, and a Little Green Man with a white jumpsuit and a snaggletoothed smile emerges. In second-person narration that has an understated tenderness, Sauer (Nugget and Fang) follows the two through the day. The boy’s parents don’t notice the new arrival, his classmates are mesmerized, and “As for your teacher? She’ll think she needs new glasses.” Beyond the evident warmth Fujita (the Robots Rule series) creates between alien and boy, he has a real way with light; the passage of time is almost tangible in the way sunlight streams through windows or wanes as the friends race down a hill flying a kite. And when the alien’s homesickness sets in, it’s light—specifically every light in the boy’s house, as well as “a few extras here and there” (think Christmas in July)—that attracts the attention of two green parents eager to find their child. Not since E.T. has extraterrestrial entertainment stood such a good chance of making kids (and their parents) tear up. Ages 3–up. Author’s agent: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (Aug.)