Veratrum Games Corp is the outfit that ships the alien game inside the story, and the listing has a naming problem of its own. The description invites you to join Bex and Charlie on their second adventure in the Game Squad series, while the series field beside it reads Gamer Squad, book two. One letter, two different names for the same shelf, on a page a parent is meant to search. The audiobook runs four hours and four minutes.
First, the Big Picture
Bex and Charlie swore off Monsters Unleashed after the first adventure went badly, which lasts exactly as long as it takes Veratrum to release a new augmented reality game with aliens in it. Kim Harrington understands that no child in this position holds the line, and neither does the science teacher, who likes the new game because it uses real star charts. That detail is doing quiet work: it gives the adults a reason to allow the thing that is about to go wrong.
Charlie and Bex are best friends first and gamers second, and the friendship carries more of the book than the plot mechanics do. An October 2017 entry from a household with a nine-year-old reports that the story went down easily and calls it an easy enough read for her, which matches the sentence-level pitch: short chapters, clean cause and effect, no vocabulary designed to slow anyone down. The comedy is broad and the peril resets quickly.
Aliens arrive in two flavors, one sweet and kind and one decidedly not, and the second is loose in the town by the time the class trip to the observatory ends. That is a tidy engine for this age band. The threat is concrete, the solution is something the kids can attempt themselves, and the stakes stay local. Nobody is saving a galaxy here; they are trying to catch one bad extraterrestrial before it wrecks the place where they live.
What Makes Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind Worth Hearing
Observatories, radio telescopes and star charts are not decoration in this plot, they drive it, and a listener picks up a working idea of what those instruments are for without being taught anything. The copy sells it as Pokemon Go meeting The Goonies, which undersells the science and oversells the danger, but the shorthand is close enough. A child who has ever chased a creature across a park on a phone screen will recognize the premise inside a minute. What makes it work as audio is that the game exists mostly as description: nobody has to watch a screen, so the imagined version a listener builds is more vivid than any illustration would be. Books about screens usually lose something in this format, and this one gains.
Stars are also what makes this worth a second run. A November 2017 entry describes a nine-year-old avid reader in the family, one who asks for book money at Christmas, and that is the profile this fits best: a confident young reader who wants a series to move through rather than a single story to savor. Four hours is roughly three bedtimes or one long journey, and the chapter breaks land often enough to stop anywhere. Harrington also resists the usual sequel trap of making the second outing bigger. The threat has changed species, not scale, and the town stays the same size.
A Few Reservations
Adults wrote every response on this page. Four of the five report a child's verdict rather than their own, with ages given as eight and nine, which means almost nothing on the page comes from the audience the book was actually made for. That is normal for middle grade and it still limits what the 4.8 average can tell you. A grown-up reporting that a book was liked is real evidence; it is not the same evidence as a listener describing what the hour actually felt like.
Tantor Media released the recording on April 13, 2021, and an entry headed Awesome book for my 8yr old, filed two months before that date, praises the item for arriving in perfect condition. Packaging is not a chapter, and a grade attached to the state of a parcel still counts toward the same star average as everything else. The description also still calls this an exciting new adventure series, wording written for a launch that happened several years before the audio existed.
Amy Melissa Bentley voices everyone here, and the casting question is the interesting one. A single voice has to carry both leads, a science teacher, a classroom of extras and at least two aliens with opposite temperaments. That is a lot of range for four hours, and how the friendly alien sounds will decide whether a seven-year-old finds the chase funny or frightening. Play a passage with dialogue in it before buying, not the opening scene-setting.
The Right Listener for Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind
Eight to eleven is the band this lands in, and an entry headed Fun series, naming an eight-year-old who took to the whole run, backs that up. It suits a child who has finished the early chapter books and wants something with a plot engine, particularly one who plays phone games and will enjoy seeing that world treated as worth writing about. Reluctant readers do well here too, since the audio removes the decoding work.
Parents looking for a shared listen will find it works better solo than aloud in the car with a mixed-age group, because the humor is pitched at a specific developmental moment and the peril, mild as it is, arrives without much warning. Younger siblings around five or six may not enjoy the hostile alien. Classrooms are a better fit than family road trips: the observatory trip, the telescope and the star charts give a teacher something to build on, and the chapters are short enough to end a session on a hook.
Sequels are usually the wrong entry point, and this one mostly is not: the first adventure gets summarized in a line and the rest stands alone. Play the sample with the child in the room and let them decide about the alien voice, because that single casting choice determines whether the next four hours are a comedy or a chase.
