I love reading a book that makes me think “how the hell did anybody come up with this idea?” And I really enjoyed the idea’s execution here.
At the outset this book really just seems like pretty straightforward YA sci-fi fare. An astronaut wakes up on a spaceship midway through its mission and has to figure out what the mission is and what he’s meant to be doing, with the aid of an onboard computer… Only, as it turns out, things aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem. Honestly, having read Project Hail Mary not too long before I read this one, I was sort of thinking that it was giving Andy Weir — only to be promptly proven wrong by the events of the latter half of the book.
Honestly, the plot of this was super fascinating. I think Eliot Schrefer did such a good job dropping hints about what was going to happen, but not so obviously that I was able to figure it out before things started getting revealed. I was interested in the way the characters were developing and the relationship between them, and there were definitely clues that things were about to break bad, but when things really started racing along that’s when I started thinking to myself “How the f does someone even come up with this story?”
I also really appreciated the way that the characters’ queerness was handled in the narrative. That is to say, it’s basically uneventful and one of the least noteworthy things about either of them. I really find it refreshing when a character being gay or bi or otherwise attracted to the same gender isn’t treated as any stranger a fact about them than their hair or eye color — especially in speculative fiction books where society has theoretically evolved past that kind of social division or oppression.
This is a YA book and it does read like a YA book, but it feels like Eliot Schrefer is an author who understands that just because a reader is younger doesn’t mean they’re dumb. There are some pretty adult themes handled gracefully in this story and it really felt like the author was presenting them in an appropriate way and trusting the reader to be able to handle it. I enjoyed that, because I think YA readers are a lot brighter than some authors give them credit for and I hate nothing more than a YA book that feels condescending to read.
All in all, I really enjoyed this and I recommend it to YA readers of speculative fiction!