Review Detail

I found this book to be disappointing, in part for how far it fell from its potential. I'm afraid the dictates of a YA "romance" got in the way of what might have been a well-constructed tale, but above that, this novel suffered from characters who thought and acted outside of what should have been their frame of reference and I couldn't get past the author's misrepresentation of Newton's 1st Law of Motion.

When an object in space loses thrust, it does not slowly drift to a halt, as Revis claims her generation ship is doing vis a vis an engine that is incrementally losing power. This isn't a car in a parking lot. It's a spaceship in space. Frictionless objects will continue at their top speed until a force acts against them. If I sound nit-picky here, I'm not. This scenario is central to this book's plot, and Revis doesn't acknowledge the flaw. I was holding out hope that this "fact" in her story would prove another lie among many "secrets" important to the story. It was never resolved. I've since learned from a defensive reader that this flaw is addressed in further novels in the series. I'm glad to hear it, but each novel must stand on its own merits, in the end. I do wonder if an editor split up a larger ms, but still, the author should have hinted to us that she knows her physics while she had the chance. It's not appropriate to assume that I'll keep reading. Regardless, for all I know, the author could have only been made aware of this error in physics after publication, and set out to cover her tracks with clever scenario building in the 2nd book.

More importantly, I was troubled by how readily Elder adopted opinions and concerns and doubts about the ship and its leader (read: his universe as he knew it) that were unfaithful to what Elder's frame of reference would have been. Elder was too easily convinced that the social fabric of his ship was unjust and wrong and evil. His struggle with morality in the context of the ship's given ontology could have been a compelling story element. But this struggle did not exist. As an analogy, Revis' Elder was too akin to a Democratic Vice President suddenly up and switching parties because he met a cute Republican girl.

I was very intrigued by the premise of this novel. There are many fabulous ideas nestled deeply into the book. But ultimately the characters and the plot and the twists were too transparent and the story fell unfortunately flat for me.