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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | Y OH | 30470001795656 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | YA FIC OH | 32124001927086 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library | FIC OH, T. | 31550002367370 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | YA FIC OH | 32130000956000 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An NPR favorite book of 2019
Winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award
When an Earth-like planet is discovered, a team of six teens, along with three veteran astronauts, embark on a twenty-year trip to set up a planet for human colonization--but find that space is more deadly than they ever could have imagined.
Have you ever hoped you could leave everything behind?
Have you ever dreamt of a better world?
Can a dream sustain a lifetime?
A century ago, an astronomer discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. She predicted that one day humans would travel there to build a utopia. Today, ten astronauts are leaving everything behind to find it. Four are veterans of the twentieth century's space-race.
And six are teenagers who've trained for this mission most of their lives.
It will take the team twenty-three years to reach Terra-Two. Twenty-three years locked in close quarters. Twenty-three years with no one to rely on but each other. Twenty-three years with no rescue possible, should something go wrong.
And something always goes wrong.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
Ann Leckie 's first four novels were award-winning space operas, which brought something refreshingly different to the genre with her examination of gender, politics and power - not to mention narrative technique. Her debut fantasy novel, The Raven Tower (Orbit, £16.99), is similarly groundbreaking. It may seem familiar, with its dispossessed lords, vengeful gods and soldier heroes, but Leckie's central character is a transgender warrior, and the complex narrative is told partly in the second person. The warrior is Eolo, a loyal servant of Mawat, heir to the throne of Iraden. On returning from battle, the pair discover that Mawat's father has vanished and his uncle has usurped the throne. It falls on Eolo to investigate the disappearance. A god in the form of a rock called Strength and Patience of the Hill recounts the fraught history of the Iraden kingdom as Leckie again examines the role of power in society - this time, that of manipulative gods - and spins a gripping tale of intrigue and politics. Tade Thompson's critically acclaimed Rosewater centred on psychic government agent Kaaro and his work investigating the emergence of an alien life form in Nigeria: it was set in the eponymous shanty town formed around the alien's vast dome. His follow-up, The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, £8.99), tells the complex story of how humanity reacts to, and interacts with, an alien invasion. Kaaro takes a minor role this time, as we follow his lover Aminat working to locate Alyssa Sutcliffe, an amnesiac human who has become alien. Meanwhile, the mayor of Rosewater has declared independence, much to the ire of the Nigerian government. A fragmented, non-linear narrative constantly head-hops between no fewer than eight characters, but Thompson is an expert storyteller and ties up the multiple storylines in a mesmerising finale. Although this is a standalone, it's best appreciated after reading Rosewater . Following two award-winning short-story collections, Helen Marshall's first novel The Migration (Titan, £8.99) fulfils her early promise in a moving study of love, family bonds, climate change and personal transformation. Against a frighteningly realistic backdrop of global warming and a pandemic that affects children, teenager Sophie Perella, her younger sister Kira and their mother move from Toronto to England following marital break-up and the diagnosis that Kira is affected by juvenile idiopathic immunodeficiency syndrome. The family moves in with Sophie's aunt, an Oxford professor researching the black death who works with an organisation treating the afflicted children. Spectres of climate change and the plague haunt the novel, but what in lesser hands might have been a gloom-laden read is transformed by the author's quiet optimism. The Autist (Infinity Plus, £10.99), Stephen Palmer's thematic sequel to his well received 2016 novel Beautiful Intelligence , is a long, discursive investigation into a world dominated by artificial intelligence. It's 2100, and AIs have spawned Artificial General Intelligences, ubiquitous god-like entities that operate independently from human interference. The novel follows British data-detective Mary Vine and her investigations into an AGI that appears to be nudging the human race towards becoming a homogeneous, affectless collective. Aided by Nigerian Ulu and her autistic brother, whose condition enables him to communicate with AGIs, Mary travels to Thailand in search of the corporation responsible for the culpable AGI. What follows is a twisty exploration of the technological destiny of the human race and the lengths to which corporations and individuals will go to manipulate others, culminating in a bittersweet finale in which, perhaps inevitably, only one party achieves what they desire. Temi Oh's first novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two? (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), combines a number of genre tropes - a planet Earth ravaged by global warming, a starship journey and stellar colonisation - to produce an ambitious 500-page coming-of-age blockbuster. It's 2012 on an Earth very much like our own, except that Britain has a space exploration programme and ultra-fast space flight has been developed. Several nations are sending ships to an Earth-like extra-solar world: six British teenagers selected for their abilities, along with four adult astronauts, embark on a mission to Terra-Two that will take more than 20 years to complete. The narrative follows the viewpoint of each of the six, building up a comprehensive psychological profile of the teenagers as they experience the trauma of confinement, fraught interpersonal relationships and nostalgia for everything they have left behind. It's a slow-burner, with psychodrama standing in for action for two thirds of the book, but Oh is excellent at portraying the aching sense of loss on a one-way trip to the stars.
Kirkus Review
This debut novel suggests that in space, there is always room for drama.Even the most casual genre fan knows that a multiyear journey to a distant planet is probably doomed from the start. Unfortunately, no one sent the memo to the alternate early-21st-century Britain where this story begins. Decades after probes send back images and data from a seemingly idyllic Earth-like planet with no sentient life, the U.K. Space Agency plots a 23-year-long colonization mission to this "Terra-Two" with four adult astronauts plus six teenagers who have spent the last six years in a highly competitive academy that has trained them for space to the point of burnout, so much so that one of them, Ara, commits suicide the day before the launch in 2012. The senior crew are practically ciphers, particularly the noble and kind captain; the story focuses on the young prodigies: gifted pilot Harry, whose arrogance often tips toward cruelty; Astrid, whose devotion to the mission mingles with a religious mania; her twin, Juno, who relies on science and rules to the exclusion of tact; beautiful polyglot Poppy, whose polished exterior masks the emotional damage she suffered as an abused and neglected child; Eliot, a brilliant engineer and Ara's grieving boyfriend; and Jesse, who believes it was his destiny to go on the mission but, as Ara's last-minute replacement, never quite feels part of the crew. Despite extensive psychological testing, no one seems to have realized that this group might have some trouble getting along, which is presumably essential for a decadeslong journey in a small vessel. There's friction from the beginning, magnified by serious mechanical trouble within the mission's first year. Why was this mix of careful planning and egregious blind spots allowed to launch in the first place? Was the need for the U.K. to win the space race so important that it was worth sacrificing these people and resources even though the possibility for success was so slim? Preferring to focus on the fraught interplay among the junior crew, author Oh never provides answers to the many questions her plot raises, nor offers much hope that the ensuing 22 years will lead to a happy outcome.Curiously unresolved; perhaps intentionally so but unsatisfying either way. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A century ago, an astronomer theorized that the universe contained a second Earth, Terra-Two. Once the existence of another habitable planet was confirmed by NASA, nations scrambled to send exploratory missions. The UK Space Agency's mission consists of six teenagers, selected from hundreds of applicants, and four adults, veterans of late-twentieth-century missions to the moon and Mars. They have a decades-long journey before them, and despite the careful planning and testing surrounding their selection, things go wrong. The mission itself is ultimately a framework for a story about how a group of people under pressure copes with isolation and responsibility for one another's safety and the consequences of agreeing to a journey well beyond anything humans have experienced before. The mission is complicated by the very real dangers of space travel. A relatively small cast of characters allows for some satisfying exploration of the ways people might cope with exactly what being on an interstellar journey means for their relationships and whether or not they are ready for the consequences.--Regina Schroeder Copyright 2019 Booklist