2021 YA SF, first of a trilogy. Tina has never been ordinary: she was
left on Earth by aliens, and knows they'll come back for her one day.
But when that day comes, it's far more dangerous than she expected…
I feel old and tired.
I read a fair bit of SF and fantasy published as yound adult which is
basically a normal story that happens to have a young protagonist.
This feels much more something designed to be a Young Adult book first
and a story second.
The science in this SF is soft in the extreme (on the level of Star
Wars or Doctor Who), but that's not it. It's the way several other
people from Earth are scooped up to join Tina on her adventures, and
most of her interactions are with them; it's the way she turns out to
be a clone of a heroic captain, who was supposed to get the captain's
memories but something has gone wrong and so people are constantly
comparing her with her gene-donor. It's the way the captain's species
(part of a multi-species good-guy polity) has enigmatic sexual
practices and nobody will tell Tina how it all works. It's the way
that the good-guy polity is old and set in its ways and needs someone
young and energetic to kick it back into life. It's the way the main
bad guy has a weapon that not only kills people, it retroactively
causes everyone to think they were a terrible person. None of this
flows from any sort of world-building principles; it's all there
because the YA side of the story needs stuff to happen, so a
technology is invented to do it.
Which is a shame, because when it can get away from the thudding
messages and deal directly with the people the YA side is actually
pretty good. But the whole thing is ponderously slow. Parts of
descriptions just seem to be missing, presumably for the director of
the TV adaptation to fill in, but I often found myself confused over
who was where and could get to whom. And some of the dialogue feels
straight out of a psychology textbook, particularly when it comes to
the relationship Tina develops with someone whose main activity has
been to belittle her.
I was expecting to enjoy this very much more than I did. But I'll
probably keep reading the series, because I've liked Anders before;
but more to the point, because I do like these people when they can
fight their way free of the Important Messages About Growing Up, and
once in a while they get a real chance to shine.
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