Review: Overgrowth - Mira Grant

Genre: Sci-fi, Horror Published: Daphne Press (UK)/ Tor Nightfire (US), May 2025 My Rating: 1/5 stars

"We were the weeds of the universe, and if we could grow somewhere, then that place was similar to everyplace else we’d sprouted."

Before we talk about anything regarding the book itself, I want to address the major factor that contributed to my disappointment: the marketing. Whoever approved the tagline “Annihilation meets The Day of the Triffids in this full-on body horror/alien invasion apocalypse”, or recommended McGuire to publish this under her horror-pseudonym Mira Grant, created some expectations that this book simply isn’t going to meet. So if you take anything from this review, let it be a little expectation-management:

1. This is not “Annihilation meets Day of the Triffids”. It’s closer to “Little Shop of Horrors/Rocky Horror Show meets Independence Day”

2. It’s also not “full-on body-horror”, and a far cry from her previous books published under the Mira Grant-lable. It’s more so a mix of light horror, YA-feeling-action-adventure, and a hint of cozy sci-fi. More on that in the Bad-section.

3. The main cast feel a lot like teenagers, so I feel this might’ve worked better (reworked) as a YA-novel, than marketed towards adults.

With that being said, let’s get into the review-proper, as I have a lot of thoughts.

The Good

Our story opens with 3-year-old Anastacia Miller, curiously exploring the woods just out of sight from her parents. She comes across a strange looking alien flower, and is brutally devoured by it. (Leave it to Grant to open a story, right?!)

Shortly later, Anastacia walks out of the woods and into the arms of her mother. Except, this is not the original Anastacia, but an alien copy. It’s this “Stacia” we follow into adulthood; a plant-alien in the body of a woman, living among the humans. Stacia never makes a secret of her alien-nature, introducing herself as such and warning humanity about the impending invasion that her species have planned. People just laugh and dismiss it as a quirky joke. Until the invasion begins… Now Stacia must reckon with the dilemma of where her alliances truly lie, and who she ultimately choses to be “her people”.

The story explores themes of found-family, crafting your own identity, and finding your place when you ultimately feel like a misfit most of the time. On the surface I love this idea, and at times the coziness of the friendships and relationships really steal the show. For the majority of the time though, the good was overshadowed by some glaring problems.

The Bad

As I read more of McGuires books, I’m learning that I enjoy her concepts a lot more than the way she executes them. In the case of Overgrowth, my major problem was with how unbalanced it feels in both tone and pacing.

As mentioned, the book opens with a fairly harrowing scene of child-death, before eventually frolicking off into a quirky/cozy Little-Shop-of-Horrors-style found-family story, with some absurdist jokes and pop-culture references. It’s such a tonal mismatch to the opening, as well as some of the themes it covers, that it gave me whiplash.

Then there’s the pacing, which is absolutely glacial at first, before rushing the ending. The actual alien invasion happens around the 65%-mark of the book, and the build-up is a repetition of the same events over and over again. A little before that 65%-mark, one of the characters utters this brilliantly ironic quote that I highlighted: “This is a lot of prologue. I’d like the text please.”

I genuinely don’t know if this was intentional, but she just voiced my exact thoughts on the book at that moment...

I can easily put up with a slower story, if the characters and/or world are enough to carry it though. No such luck here. Our main cast is supposed to be in their early 30’s, but read like teenagers. Our protagonist’s boyfriend and best friend also felt far too much like “stereotypical-perfect-friend” inserts, rather than actual characters, for me to truly care about them. There’s even more to be said about Graham, but that brings us into the Ugly section…

The Ugly

McGuires books have always been heavy on their messaging about diversity and society’s treatment of minorities. It’s because I support those messages, that I’m extra critical on the way they are portrayed, and I feel like McGuires strikes a rare miss here. I’ve struggled with her lack of subtlety before, but Overgrowth takes the cake and beats you over the head with it for good measure. The key to messaging in fiction, is to weave your point organically into the story, and to trust it to click with your reader. Not to interrupt the story, just so you can get on a soapbox and tell the reader what you want them to take away.

Overgrowth is guilty of the latter. It wears its themes on its sleeve: the aliens as a metaphor for the “othering” of minorities, underlined for emphasis by the parallels being drawn to Stacia’s trans-boyfriend Graham. It was all laid on só thickly that it takes you straight out of the story. A perfect example happens in a scene near the ending. Slight spoilers in the next paragraph:

During the climax of the story, our protagonist is flying through the sky on the back of what’s basically an “alien-dragon”, whilst chasing a plane that has her captured friends in it. During this scene, in the midst of this high-stakes aerial plane-chase, she literally asks the dragon “what are your pronouns”. It was só jarring, that had it not happened at 94% through the e-book, I’d have DNF-ed it right there and then.

Worse than the lack of subtlety is the actual alien-metaphor itself, which has quite a few sharp edges when you think of it. Using friendly-plant-aliens as a metaphor for the societal mistreatment of minorities can absolutely work. Even a darker ending where the aliens turn murderous to take revenge on humanity for their mistreatment can work. Here however, the aliens are clearly established as a threat to humanity from the start; they are predators at heart with the ultimate goal of conquering. The book literally opens with the slaughter of a 3-year-old kid by one of them! Maybe I’m being too sensitive, but bringing actual child-predators anywhere close to a message about trans-folks seems wildly unproductive to me… I genuinely believe McGuire’s heart is in the right place here, but this metaphor can be misconstrued so easily that I don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole…

Thanks to Daphne Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.