Sci-fi, I guess, of the 15-minutes-into-the-future variety. A group of oddball friends and the new kid in school, a girl who was a minor celebrity because her mother left her right after she was born to be part of the crew of the first ever space mission to leave the solar system – a long, slow, one-way flight into the void. As luck would have it, the same private company is planning a follow-up mission for the near future. Didn’t like this as much as I had hoped. I enjoyed the characters, though I kept wanting those beyond the main two or three to be more fully developed. I also had mixed feelings about the writing, which was mostly in the form of short, sparse scenes. Sometimes it really worked for me, in part because I came to appreciate that it captured and reflected something important about the way the main character – a tough, overburdened young woman who holds together her friend group, her role as head of a household consisting of herself and her younger brother and his baby, her frequent fist-fights, and school through sheer force of will – experiences life. But sometimes it just didn’t work for me, and I wanted more. My biggest concern with the book, though, was that there were a number of instances, particularly early on but later in the book too, where the motivation of a character for a particular choice or action was just not sufficiently established, and it felt either arbitrary or clearly done in service of the plot. Anyway, I’m certainly not writing off this author, because I felt enough of a spark from this book to get why it appeals to lots of people, but it just wasn’t for me.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.