Book 26 of 2024: Star Bound: A feelgood space adventure (Odyssey Earth Series Book 3)

Star Bound: A feelgood space adventure (Odyssey Earth Series Book 3) by Rex Burke.

Quick synopsis: The six castaway teenagers and their teacher are brought home. But "home" has lots of issues to work out.

Brief opinion: I loved book 1 so much, I wish I had better things to say about this one. Book 2 was downhill from book 1 for me, and book 3 downhill from book 2.

Plot: [I finished reading the book and immediately opened this window to write the review, and already I can't remember what the plot was. That's kind of telling...]

On the planet New Earth, the evil billionaire is making trouble.

On the twin planet (named Dave...), the weather is turning bad. But luckily one of the people from New Earth "borrows" a small ship and flies off to Dave to rescue the kids and their teacher.

Once both groups are back together, they have to deal with the evil billionaire. Once that is done, it's happily ever after.

Writing/editing: Both were fine. As I mentioned in my review of book 1, this series is very British. It reads sort of like a British sitcom (so if you find the series funny or not depends on your opinion of those).

This series is billed as "a feelgood space adventure", but I never understood that. The three books seemed like normal books with ups and downs. British humor is a thing, is British feelgood-ness also a thing? Maybe I'm just not seeing the feelgood-ness. The series did have a happy ending, but that's not uncommon in books.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I liked book 1 so much, I wish I didn't have to talk about things I didn't like in my review of 2 and this one.

In my review of 2, I had mentioned not liking the evil billionaire character. It was much worse in this book; I ended up skimming or skipping most of the chapters with him. I had this visceral reaction to him, I just could not stand spending even a moment of time with him. I usually have no issues with villain characters, I often like them best! I don't know what it was about the evil billionaire that got that reaction out of me.

Related to that, I didn't believe that the resolution around him would work.

While I had some mild amusement in book 1, I didn't find 2 and 3 funny at all (but that was probably just American-me not getting the British humor). Lots of puns and pop references which are the opposite of funny to me.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: A generous ⭐️⭐️ ½, 2.5 stars. The half-star is from good feeling leftover from book 1.