This book has sat on my bookshelf for an embarrassingly long amount of time. I think I bought it from Ollie’s in like 2016? I’m the type of person that when I see a popular book on sale I usually end up buying it. Had no idea what this book was about, I actually thought it was a book like The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Which wasn’t a bad thing, I loved that book, but I wasn’t rushing to read another book like it. Then, the power went out the first week of August. I literally had nothing to do, I was on break from college and I couldn’t work without my computer. So I just started reading books for a readathon that I’d signed up for, and this book had fit one of the prompts perfectly. No clue what I was getting into, no idea what this book was about, and just started reading. I literally could not put this book down.
Kady’s planet was attacked and now she is on a ship that is making a slow 6-month trek to a jump spot. They can’t even communicate with people in the main human galaxy before they get to this jump point, and it wouldn’t take this long if their ships weren’t damaged. They are also being chased by the group who attacked their planet, so they will have to be on guard for the entire trip. Soon, Kady is communicating with someone who is trying to figure out what is really happening on the ship and what the higher-ups are keeping from everyone. Then, they find out about a plague breaking out, and things get really intense.
To be honest, this book may have one of the saddest/scariest fictional plagues I have ever read. By the end of the book, the words “Don’t look at me” were enough for me to just about start crying. I don’t know how the authors thought of this book, it was absolutely wild! And seeing the ship’s little flyers about how to stay safe seemed so basic like this was some sort of flu. Reading this during the current pandemic may not have been the best choice, as it wasn’t the most fun comparing current events to in book events, but I was still able to get through it.
A big part of this book was Kady talking to her ex-boyfriend Ezra. They had broken up the day of the attack, and they were put on separate ships, but they still found ways to sneakily contact each other. Since he was a part of the sort of on-board military, he was often finding out about things before the other common citizens of the ship knew about it. He also had his own friends and storylines, but nearly everything is told from the perspective of text messages/email messages sent between different characters.
Now, let’s mention the beautiful art. Some pages are filled with art from some of the scenes that occur out in space, and I absolutely love it. Sometimes I would look at a page for 5 minutes or more just to read all the text and absorb the image. They really added to the story. There was only one image that occurs near the end of the book that I didn’t enjoy. Slight spoiler, but I’m not telling the details of the image just what the image is. It is an image of what Kady looks like, and it kind of ruined a major illusion of the book for me. Because there were no pictures of any of the characters throughout the whole book, they could be any race that I wanted them to be. It’s in the future in space, it should be very diverse anyways! But of course, Kady looked like the typical white girl with “long brown hair” in this photo, which just threw me back to the days when most popular fantasy/science fiction/dystopian/romance YA novels included the trope of “just your normal boring brown hair, brown eyes, white girl” main character. Think Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. I didn’t get those vibes from this book at all, but it was a bit disappointing to see this when she was revealed. I don’t think including that photo added anything to the story, so I wish it just hadn’t been included so I could have kept imagining what Kady looked like. This did not decrease my rating of the book though.
What did make me decrease my rating from 5 stars to 4 stars was the ending. What was that ending? I felt like it was so anticlimactic. Everything was leading up to such a different ending, but at the last minute it was like “sike” and I was just left like…..why? I felt like it would have been better if they had just ended with the ending that they were clearly going towards. It would have felt more powerful, at least to me. Also didn’t love the “redeeming” arc that happened with one character. I felt like what the character had done wasn’t forgivable, but that’s what seemed to happen.
I would definitely still recommend this science fiction book to anyone looking for a new space YA novel to read.
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 books.
