Book 7 of 2024: Learning to Swear in America | DNF: Nightfall

Learning to Swear in America by Katie Kennedy.

Quick synopsis: Set in the real world and current time, an asteroid is headed for Earth. If it hits, it will destroy all of the west coast of the US (and the resulting tsunami would destroy Japan). NASA brings in experts from around the globe to try to help stop it. Yuri, 17 year old child genius/physicist prodigy from Russia, is one of them.

Plot: Yuri is not your average teenager. He graduated college at the age of 12, got his masters and doctoral degrees soon after. He's had no social life (no friends, no girlfriend), but his love is physics, so he's happy with his life.

When NASA puts out the call for help, Yuri is requested by the US and Russia agrees to lend him. This leads to Plot A of the book, which was completely wonderful. Seeing NASA through the eyes of a teenage boy from Russia was so well written and so believable.

Yuri gets his own office at NASA (the JPL branch, NEO/Near Earth Objects division) and has to work with people more than twice his age. Some of them listen to him and respect the work he's done, but his direct group leader does not and that leads to a number of issues.

The tension in this part of the story is high. They have less than two weeks before the asteroid hits and so much of the math they have to do is new. Then, near the end, a twist about the asteroid makes everything harder, but the cutting-edge, Nobel Prize-level math Yuri had been finishing while still in Russia becomes key.

Plot B was opposite of A in every way. By chance, Yuri meets a "beautiful" American girl (Dovie). I really liked the "beautiful" part. Yuri saw her as beautiful, but by the hints the author dropped, I'm pretty sure she wasn't conventionally pretty at all -- she was described as "round" multiple times, had a lot of piercings, some kind of wacky hair cut that I couldn't visualize, and some other things. The two quickly become friends and soon even closer.

The fact that Yuri would want a friend/girlfriend was completely believable. He was a 17 year old boy who had never had either. But that, with six days left before half of the world is destroyed, he snuck out to go to high school with Dovie to save her from a "mean" teacher? And a couple days later went to the prom with her? I don't think someone so smart would do that.

And speaking of high school/the teachers, the math teacher Yuri wanted to save her from kept a massive snake in a tank at the front of the room. Every Friday he called his students up one by one and made them solve equations on the front board. If they got it wrong, he made them take a baby hamster from a tank in the back of the room and made them feed it to the snake. The kids were described as sobbing and shaking as they did it. Everything about the high school visit seemed so unrealistic.

Dovie, a 16 year old girl with no driver's license, drove them all around everywhere. She was described as hitting curbs, cutting other drivers off, running traffic signals, all that. Yet, at the end of the book, she drove for three days across country to try to help save Yuri. She got into a car chase with multiple police cars, but she came out on top.

Plot A ended the 80% point of the book, the last chunk was all Plot B. Early on in the story, Yuri overheard NASA people talking about how the US wasn't going to let him go back to Russia, that he was (unwillingly) going to defect to the US. Yuri, Dovie, and Dovie's teenage brother talked about what to do about that. One suggested that Yuri go to the closest Russian embassy for help, but that idea was dropped for no reason. Instead they used this whole unbelievable, unrealistic plot about driving across country so he could sneak into Canada.

The plot included the three teenagers successfully outwitting FBI agents and besting police multiple times.

Writing/editing: The writing was great. Apparently the author spent time in Russia and it showed. I 100% believed Yuri as a genius. Every single moment of the NASA stuff was simply wonderful. If the book had been all about this part of the plot, it would be one of my favorite books ever.

I think Plot B was added for young readers. I'm sure the evil school teacher and the teenage girl without a license successfully driving across country and outwitting police would delight them. But it made adult me unhappy. (Can't blame a YA book for wanting to make young readers happy though.)

The editing was perfect, I didn't spot even one small issue.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Even with this template, what I liked and didn't like seems to have gotten mixed up into the other sections. LOVED all the parts about NASA, I really disliked all the social/teenager stuff.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: 4.5. Even with my dislike of Plot B, if the last 20% of the book hadn't been all unbelievable stuff, Plot A would have been good enough to carry the book and give it 5 stars. I loved Yuri's character! Even though the book wrapped up nicely, I'd really like to spend more time with him.

I wish this author would write more fiction books. I read and loved What Goes Up, her only other non-childrens book (review here). Since those two books, she's only written two books for children about how the US government works, sadly I'm not interested in those.

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DNF #4: Nightfall by Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski. Set on some fictional world (one where the physics seem to make zero sense), a town exists on an island. That island has 14 years of sunlight and then 14 years of night. When night comes, the people of the town get on a boat and sail to another land that has 3 days of sun/3 days of night. Then 14 years later they go back. Someone please explain to me how a planet like that would even work.

For amazingly stupid reasons, three teenagers get left behind when the 14 years of night start and the townspeople move away. They have to survive monsters that apparently somehow just show up when darkness comes.

Lord this was a stupid book. I wanted to DNF it at about 3%, but I pushed myself to stick with it. I ended up DNFing it at 56% instead. Nothing about it made sense. There was zero logic behind what little worldbuilding there was in the story, the authors just expected us to go along with these stupid ideas with no explanations. The teenagers should have been dead moments into the time they were left alone; they just kept doing such stupid stuff.