Book 13 of 2024: Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

[thistlechaser]

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh.

Quick synopsis: Set in the real world/current time, an Earth-like planet is discovered. A group of teenagers and senior astronauts are sent to explore it.

Plot: Set in 2019 (same year it was published), Terra-Two was discovered and thought to be a new world that humanity could move to. Since it would take 23 years to travel through space to get to it, the crew of the first ship headed there would be made mostly of teenagers, so they'd be young enough to have time on the planet and send lots of info back to Earth.

The book was broken up into three parts.

Part 1: Teens from around the world were tested, only the best trained to go. The story followed as the group was narrowed down, and the intensive training and testing (medical/psychological) they had to go through.

Part 2: The space voyage... which turned out to be just YA teenage relationship drama in space. Part 1 was so believable and well written, part 2 was unbelievable trash.

The six teens who beat out all the other teens in the world to go, who were tested so intensely to make sure they were the right ones, were the worst. The commander-in-training was a god awful bully (he put another kid in an air lock and threatened to kill him because the other kid had given him pointers on how to play a video game...). One kid had psychological problems and had hallucinations. One kid had depression so bad she stayed in bed for weeks. And one of the kids killed herself on launch day. Whoever was running the space program should have been fired, none of those kids belonged on that ship.

Because the one girl had killed herself, a boy from the backup crew took her place. But the backup crew had next to no training, so he didn't even know the layout of the space ship. Where is the logic in that! That makes zero sense.

The adult characters might as well not have existed. They acknowledged that there were problems (like the depressed girl who never got out of bed), but they did nothing at all to solve it, it was left in the teens' hands to deal with it.

Part 3: Even less believable than part 2. Blah blah, explosion in space, all the adults were dead, kids had to try to survive. In the vastness of space, somehow a different spaceship just happened to find them and rescue them.

I started skimming in the middle of part 2, though I read most of part 3. Big waste of time.

Writing/editing: The editing was okay (I saw a number of issues, which should not have been there in this traditionally published book). The technical writing was fine. The story writing was the worst. Endless plot holes and lack of logic.

In addition, most of the teens blurred together, at least the girls. The boys were the bully, the outcast, and the crazy loner. The girls were... um. The pretty one and the two less pretty ones. Two of the girls were twins, but I have no idea which of the three they were.

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Part 1 was really, really good. I actually paused reading to see what else the author had written so I could read something else by her next. Part 2 and 3 were just awful though, and I was glad I hadn't seen anything else by her I wanted.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: 1.5. Only part 1 saves it from being "hated". If I were rating on parts 2 and 3 alone, they'd be a 1/hated without question.