Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

The Oceans between Stars (Chronicle of the Dark Star 2) by Kevin Emerson.

I struggled with this book a lot more than I did the first one, and I ended up skimming a lot.

Plot-wise, the two main characters, Liam and Phoebe, were attempting to catch up with the spaceship holding most of humanity. The sun was going supernova, and so humanity was traveling to another planet. They had been left behind.

The good things about this book:
- The science part of sci-fi. The story explained some aspects of quantum physics (such as the multiverse theory) in ways that kids could understand. Big thumbs up!
- The author wasn't afraid to have large chunks of time pass (like the two kids being in stasis for 10 years and then 33 years, yet to them it felt like only a week had passed).
- Um... it was short?

Bad things:
- The two child main characters were dull as hell. Even after reading two books in a row, I can't name one single character trait about Liam, and barely more than one about Phoebe.
- The endless time travel felt like a cheat, an easy way for the characters to get out of trouble.
- Nonstop action. Which might seem like a good thing, but I'd rather have story/plot than BOOM EXPLOSION WHOOSH.
- Perhaps the biggest issue was that everything always went wrong. Every single thing the main characters did, every time they needed to do something, never once in two books did anything go right. So, in this book, when the kids were trying to accomplish what they had been after across these two books, I never for a moment thought they would succeed. The author played it up like they would succeed, then at the last minute there was a "twist" and they failed. That made the whole plot so boring.

This book ended on a cliffhanger, but since I have zero feelings for the main characters, I'm immune to it. I'm not going to finish this series.

I wish I could have liked this book more. I can appreciate what the author was doing, but I guess it just wasn't the book for me.