Pool Crashers

Dot Pruitt is a dog groomer with a great pool, a lemon tree, and a fiancé who has just been caught in her bed with his receptionist. She kicks him out, calls her best friend Rocky, and settles in for a night of cheese puffs and self-pity. Then something enormous drops out of the sky and lands in her deep end. Out climb three seven-foot, brightly furred visitors. Orrin is teal and gravely polite. Quill is magenta and can’t stop selling things. Tobe is gold and just wants to find a hardware store. They have spent eleven years in space learning English from the only channels their ship could pick up, so Orrin talks like a weather forecast, Quill like a late-night infomercial, and all of them are a little too fond of toasters. The aliens are exhausted, matted, and badly in need of a trim, and Dot knows exactly what to do about that. Under all that fur, it turns out, are three extremely good-looking men. Now Dot and Rocky have to keep their new houseguests hidden from a nosy neighbor with a clipboard, find a very large magnet, and get a broken starship fixed before the whole town finds out. That plan lasts about a day. Quill walks into the gas station and promptly starts selling hot dogs. His dance goes viral. Dot’s ex goes on a quest for revenge with a very serious federal agent. A weather scientist keeps turning up with a greyhound and a radar printout. Dot’s mother and her fearsome Aunt Pat arrive early. Through all of it, Orrin keeps trying to finish a sentence that begins with “The forecast for you and me is...,” and somebody always interrupts him. Then the captain they thought they’d lost radios in, and the clock starts: twelve days until the ship that will take everyone home arrives. Dot has to decide what she wants, and for once, it isn’t about what anyone expects of her. Pool Crashers is a warm, silly, big-hearted comedy about found family, second chances, and the strange things that happen when you stop doing what you’re supposed to do. It has goats, a nightclub, a lamp shop, an unusually effective eighty-year-old with a binder, and the world’s most unlikely love story, told with a lot of heart and a good number of exclamation points.

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