Thank you to Edelweiss and the publishers for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.
I will be the first to admit that I don’t read many science fiction novels that take place in space. I think I’ve always been very worried about there being too much space jargon that would leave me befuddled. However, I’ve been actively trying to change that and when I read the premise of this novel, I thought it was interesting enough to give it a go!
Summary (Goodreads): Can you fall in love with someone you’ve never met, never even spoken to – someone who is light years away?
Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship travelling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity amongst the stars. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth – with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.
Their only communication with each other is via email – and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit across space. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.
But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?
Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone . . .
Review:
While the story sounded interesting, this novel ended up being a flop for me – but not for the reasons I was anticipating. I actually did not feel overwhelmed at all by any of the science. In fact, dare I say, there wasn’t enough science in this story? But that’s me being a little unfair so I won’t get into it. However, I definitely had an issue with the execution of the story.
There were multiple ways in which the execution just did not live up to my expectations. For one thing, the main character was just a little too normal for her situation. Think about it: you are the first child to ever have been born in space and you have been alone there for years! For her to be such a normal teenager was quite unexpected. Her typical teenager would have been something to be loved had she been in a story that was more realistic. I also thought it was a bit too weird that the author focused so much on Romy’s love of fan fiction; it just served to make the story sound more juvenile.
And that was my general problem with the entire story. Everything was so juvenile. Even though the actual concept behind the story was very plausible, it came off as ridiculous because of its execution. There was just no serious undertone to the story and everything sounded very childish. Even the way the characters revealed their motives sounded fake and lacked the genuineness and emotion I was hoping to see. Now, I know this is YA fiction but that doesn’t mean that it should seem kiddish. This element of childishness really threw me off and it made it hard for me to connect with the motives of other characters in the story. It also made it hard for me to believe in the gravity of the situation, and it caused me to never properly connect to Romy.
Honestly, I pushed through this novel until the end in the hopes that the plot would be good enough for me to forgive the execution fails. But it wasn’t. The story was just blah and the only thing I remembered about the story was how much I didn’t like it. There just wasn’t enough depth and development to keep me interested. For those reasons, I’m giving this a 1/5 stars.
Happy reading ~