My Best Friend Runs Venus by Katrina S. Forest is a story about a pair of friends named Kade and Tamika who are members of a group of children who live in robot bodies on planets across the solar system. Kade is tech-savvy and uses that to his advantage against the adults who only come to the planets for hours at a time to teach the kids. Tamika’s only friend is Kade as many people think that she is just like her mother, a criminal.
This book had an interesting premise, but I believe that it got lost along the way. At first, I thought the story was going to mostly be about Tamika finding out the truth about her mother, but it was mostly about just Kade and Tamika running around different planets and meeting different people. This wouldn’t have been a bad thing if the story was more coherent. The story was too short for me to really understand who was who. I couldn’t remember the important things about each character, which meant that big “reveals” had me more confused than anything.
If you read the synopsis of this book you read that Tamika is a princess. Now, even though she is a princess, I did not get the feeling that she “ran Venus” at all in the story. At best she was a princess in hiding, and that wasn’t even the main focus of the novel. The only person even protecting her was her best friend, some random kid named Kade. It was more interesting learning about the other kids who seemed to be somewhat rich and have somewhat positions of power, even if they weren’t using them for good, than to learn about Kade and Tamika in this story.
The one thing that I did like in this story was the premise of a world with minimal interference from adults. Since the adults couldn’t physically stand to be in their bodies for too long, the children basically ran around on the planets by themselves. It seemed a bit unrealistic that adults could only do it for a few hours at a time but Kade and Tamika could literally spend months outside of their physical bodies, but it made for an interesting story arc. I wish that the whole “adult-free world” idea had been expanded upon more. Like what sort of crazy things would these children build on these planets without adult supervision for hours at a time. Their imaginations could literally go wild, but they seemed to be bound by technology in this book.
Overall, I wouldn’t really recommend this book. It had an interesting premise, but the overall story seemed as if too many things were going on at once for me to keep track of everything.
I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.
Overall Rating: 2 out of 5 books
