The Loneliest Girl in the Universe
Lauren James
HarperTeen
Fiction, YA Sci-Fi/Thriller
*+ (Terrible/Bad)
DESCRIPTION: Romy Silvers is the girl who should never have been born, let alone been stuck alone in command of humanity's first colony exploration vessel to another star. But a series of accidents and disasters led to her conception, the failure of the stasis pods holding the rest of the crew, and the deaths of her parents, so NASA had no choice but to default to the only living human aboard the Infinity. Now sixteen, Romy's been on her own for five years, her only line of communication being audio messages exchanged (over a year delay) with her therapist Molly back at NASA. She fills her time with her studies, ship maintenance, and writing her own fanfic for her favorite TV show, Loch and Ness, using the characters to play out her own hopes and fears.
When Molly tells her that another ship, the Eternity, has been launched - a ship with vastly improved systems and greater propulsion, which will not only catch up to her but compress the journey ahead from decades to a mere four years - Romy is ecstatic, and when Commander Jay starts sending his own communication she can hardly contain herself. At last, she won't be alone anymore! She has someone else to talk to! But things take a strange, dark turn when her communications with NASA end abruptly, and someone else appears to take control of the mission. With her anxiety ramped up and nothing making sense anymore, Romy begins to fear the worst - but she needs to be stronger than her fear if she's going to figure out what's going on, let alone survive.
REVIEW: It's a bad sign when I want to smack a character across the face multiple times during a book. It's an even worse sign when, as the climax nears, I'm actively hoping for a "meteors fall, everyone dies" ending.
Things start a little shaky with Romy Silvers, a girl who essentially had to raise herself and is saddled with serious anxiety issues, issues which slide way past "understandable angst" into "how does she survive brushing her teeth?" territory. For all that she's supposed to be intelligent and self-sufficient, she has all the spine of cooked spaghetti and less agency than the origami chickens she makes as part of a borderline-disturbed daydream over how idyllic her life on Earth Two will be with her imagined version of Jay (the only unrelated male she has ever communicated with). She is such a victim, prone to making such stupid decisions and squandering every possible advantage, that sympathy soon jumped out the airlock as she repeatedly and invariably rationalized or cried away every chance to stand up. Seriously, at one point, she's fleeing from danger in her nightgown and bare feet. Romy Silvers, the ostensible heroine who had to raise herself on a spaceship and is supposed to have an IQ greater than the average ditzy blonde from a bad horror movie, running around in a nightgown, utterly incapable of concocting the most rudimentary of plans, and repeatedly being suckered back in even once she's figured out the game. There are also numerous nightmare "jump-scare" sequences, which lost their impact very early on, as the author deliberately dances about the details of Romy's childhood and the traumatic deaths of her parents... the truth of which she only fully understands at the climax, by which point events had gone so far beyond credulity that I honestly just did not even care anymore. The true reason for the rating has to do with spoiler-level details of the climax, which basically put this with Netflix's turkey Another Life as a PSA to spay and neuter astronauts. Or maybe NASA should just give up on sending live humans any further than the post office; if this book is any indication, either their screening process leaks like a screen door or people just aren't psychologically equipped to deal with space, even when they're born there.
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