Due for publication in May 2016, this novel explores what it means to love and just how it can impact on your life.
This has a beautiful cover, and I was intrigued by the idea of a group of people living completely alienated from anything we have experience of. For reasons I’m not totally clear about, this ship has left Earth trying to find somewhere to settle. The mission is due to take several hundred years, so it is clear that many of the people we meet have never experienced anything other than the routine of the ship, and may die before they have the opportunity to experience anything other than this sterile environment.
Seren, the 16 year old main character, is a little different to many of those on board the ship. She questions things, and doesn’t seem completely satisfied with the life mapped out for her. In many ways, this is a fairly typical YA story of someone coming to terms with who they are and what they want from life, while dealing with the fact that their wishes don’t necessarily fit with those of the people around them.
The first part of the book is about setting up the environment for us. I feel I never really got this fully, and I got so frustrated by how quickly she fell in love with Dom. Not being totally accepting of this meant that I found a lot of the book hard to accept. The drama of the final section however sneaked up on me. This was confidently handled, and I got more of a sense of what could have been. While it ended well in some ways, I felt I just had too many unresolved questions to be really satisfied with this novel.
Thanks to NetGalley for the advance read.