I really wanted to love this book. The main word that I would use to describe this book is "busy". For the first third of the book, you have chapters with up to three different character perspectives in them, all with a ton of characters that you don't know if they are going to be important or not, and you bounce between them so fast I felt like I was getting whiplash. This didn't really stop once the plot lines merged together. There was never a moment to breathe in this book, and I think it suffered a lot for it. There were a couple of brief flashback moments for Ocean and Haven, but they came so late in the book (for Haven especially) that I found it so incredibly frustrating to not have had the knowledge sooner. I also had a hard time with the amount of Korean words that were used without a lot of context for what they meant, and I didn't find the glossary until I had already finished the book. The worldbuilding of the universe was sloppily handled, I still don't understand what the Alliance is, how (or why) gas giants have people living on them, or why there are raiders and what their motivations are. How much of Earth is still livable? How did Korea end up as the space exploring Earth super power? What was the actual purpose of the original mission that Dae's crew did to some other planet? I have so many unanswered questions because the plot, such as it was, just whisked on by, and then ended abruptly with no resolution at all for any of the open threads.

I do think that this story and its world had a ton of potential so I feel disappointed and frustrated with not liking it. I think the story really would have been served better if it had been written for visual media first. I think the dizzying flashing between scenes featuring Haven, Ocean, and Teo in the beginning of the book would have been much easier to follow if I had been watching it on a screen, and I think that the parts of the world building that felt sloppy to me would have been easier to understand if there had been a visual backdrop for all of the scenes, and there would have been more space to quickly make the universe more tangible. I do not plan on reading the sequel for this and I'm bummed that I didn't love it as much as I had hoped to.