Adrianna Cuevas has been entertaining young readers for years with her delightfully spooky horror novels; past outings feature ghosts, zombies, and a witch. Now, in her latest book, What Fell From the Sky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 11), aliens take center stage in a gripping and timely story that calls back to classic science fiction.

“Alien is one of my favorite movies ever,” Cuevas told Kirkus from her home just south of Austin, Texas. “And once my book became historical fiction, it immediately called up ET for me.” The historical aspect she references is the depiction of a real U.S. military operation during one week in 1952 that saw a small town overrun by a pretend “Aggressor Nation” as a Cold War training exercise.

What Fell From the Sky transposes the story onto the fictional town of Soledad, Texas, where a young boy named Pineda watches events unfold and reckons with a discovery all his own: an alien he dubs Luisa, who has been separated from her parents and soon faces the real aggression of the conveniently stationed military. We spoke with Cuevas over Zoom to learn more; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Alien stories provide an opportunity to explore an outsider’s point of view on human behaviors. What did you want to highlight in Luisa’s voice?

What’s interesting is that the original draft of the manuscript was not told from a dual perspective; it was told completely from Pineda’s viewpoint. As I went over issues with my editor, I realized they could be solved if I split the narrative and gave Luisa her own perspective. Doing that opened up the story. I was trying to explore the experience of being in a situation where everything is new to you; you’re an outsider. I explored that a bit with Cuba in My Pocket, which is about my dad’s immigration story but completely fantastical; dropping an alien down in the middle of rural 1950s Texas highlighted how Pineda felt like an outsider in his own town.

I have a linguistics background, and I’m an ESL teacher, so I had fun deciding what language Luisa was going to learn, and how she was going to acquire it. That’s how I landed on the whole conceit of using the alphabet, like “S is for stranger.”

It’s interesting to hear you’re an ESL teacher, because one aspect I appreciated was how little of the Spanish dialogue is directly translated in the text.

I want to honor bilingual readers; it’s boring for a bilingual reader to read Spanish and then English. It slows down the story, and it’s sometimes unnatural because characters wouldn’t actually be speaking in this way. I didn’t want to alienate anyone with my story, though, because I want it to be for everyone. The language teacher in me was thinking, I know exactly how to do this. I’ve always taught my students to look at context clues—it’s a good skill for young readers to develop—and I’ve found that young readers are more tolerant of [potentially unfamiliar language] than older readers are.

What was the research process like for the historical fiction portion of the story?

I went to the county museum where the event took place, Lampasas, Texas. When I walked into the museum and said, “Your town was part of this minute part of Texas history, and I’m going to write a book about it,” they were so excited. They went up in the attic and pulled down boxes of artifacts, news articles, even videos of interviews with townspeople who were alive during that time. They spent the whole day with me. It was phenomenal, and this book would not exist without them.

Anytime I give a talk on this book and say that it’s based on something that really happened, people can’t believe that a whole town was taken over by the army. I kept thinking back to several years ago in Texas, when we had all the undocumented minors bused in. There were people in town who protested the buses, and I kept thinking, The poor kids sitting in these buses and seeing all these angry faces. I feel like this book should end on a hopeful note, but in my mind, it doesn’t. In the end, Pineda is hoping things will be better in the future—and in my opinion they’re not. We’re still doing the same things that Pineda had to fight against. When I wrote it, though, I wanted to give him a sense of hope, because I think our kids still need that. If they’ve lost their sense of hope, of what the future can be, then forget it—we’re done. I think that’s what we end up relying on, the fact that kids are more hopeful than adults.

There’s one adult in this story who seems to have that galvanizing hope still, and that’s Corporal Shipley. He doesn’t hesitate to help the kids, despite his role in the army.

Given the historical time period, this was right when the military was [first] integrated, and it wasn’t going well. Shipley sees himself in Luisa’s struggle, he sees himself in Pineda’s struggle, and it’s a little more believable that he’s willing to help them. We’re seeing too much these days of “I’m just doing what I was told,” and we know that hasn’t gone well in the past. I was glad I had a character like Shipley to show it’s OK to go against what’s expected. He’s not being treated like he should be, and he doesn’t get recognized as a commanding officer by the white soldiers. He’s still proud of his service; those two things can exist at the same time.

I think it’s like what a lot of us experience these days. The second you express any criticism of the government or the country, it’s, “Well, why don’t you leave if you don’t love this country?” No, these two things can happen at the same time. I love living in Texas, I love the people here, I love the various cultures here, and we have an absolute trash state government that I will constantly rally against. That doesn’t mean I want to leave.

As we’ve touched on, this is a timely book. Did you set out with that goal in mind?

When I started writing this book, I did not expect the themes to be so relevant, and while I’m not glad that these things are happening, I am glad I can give kids a resource to understand them. This is my passion in storytelling, to take kids on an adventure, whether it be science fiction, mystery, or horror, and use the genre to help kids explore big themes or heavy topics. If this book can get kids to think about those around them, and question who’s being excluded and why, then I’ve done my job as a storyteller.

It’s funny, my intention with books is always just to get kids to have fun. The themes never come to me as I’m writing; plot and telling a good story are always my first motivation. I think I luck into my themes sometimes. It’s not until I start getting trade reviews that say “Cuevas explores…” that I think, Oh, I guess I did do that! Go, me!

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.