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A review by jflux
Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh
2.0
I really wanted to like this, and I found the premise really interesting: children are trained to spend over 20 years in space to be the first to colonize an earth-type planet, being sent with a small adult crew just as they are on the cusp of adulthood themselves. How would such a life shape you? There are also elements of alternate history that postulate a long history of space flight in the UK, which I found interesting.
But I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what annoyed me about this. Eventually, I realized that reading this felt like being trained for a job by someone who knows the job so well they forget to tell you half of the things you need to know. I never got a handle on what the ship looked like: snippets of description didn't seem to add up to anything I could picture. It felt like there were deeper characters than these SOMEwhere, but I wasn't seeing them. I didn't understand why half of these characters did the things they did when they did them, or I didn't buy some of the reasons given.
And small bits of story are left out. Nothing serious, but I notice these things and get frustrated. For example, early on the kids are meant to attend a ceremony that is presented as an important part of determining if the mission will be successful, or at least an important part of the story constructed around their mission being successful. Something happens that interferes, and the ceremony is never mentioned again. Was it cancelled? Did it go forward offstage, as it were? Without our main characters? It really doesn't feel like a big thing, but these are the kinds of missing details that start to add up.
Also, I don't know if it was just the ebook version but there were so many typos and mistakes that, in addition to everything else, really increased my frustration. A character's last name and the country of Wales show up in lowercase, dialogue quotation marks aren't closed, "past" is used instead of "passed," a plural is given an apostrophe, the wrong "its" is used, etc etc. This feels like a rough draft that needed a few more revisions.
But I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what annoyed me about this. Eventually, I realized that reading this felt like being trained for a job by someone who knows the job so well they forget to tell you half of the things you need to know. I never got a handle on what the ship looked like: snippets of description didn't seem to add up to anything I could picture. It felt like there were deeper characters than these SOMEwhere, but I wasn't seeing them. I didn't understand why half of these characters did the things they did when they did them, or I didn't buy some of the reasons given.
And small bits of story are left out. Nothing serious, but I notice these things and get frustrated. For example, early on the kids are meant to attend a ceremony that is presented as an important part of determining if the mission will be successful, or at least an important part of the story constructed around their mission being successful. Something happens that interferes, and the ceremony is never mentioned again. Was it cancelled? Did it go forward offstage, as it were? Without our main characters? It really doesn't feel like a big thing, but these are the kinds of missing details that start to add up.
Also, I don't know if it was just the ebook version but there were so many typos and mistakes that, in addition to everything else, really increased my frustration. A character's last name and the country of Wales show up in lowercase, dialogue quotation marks aren't closed, "past" is used instead of "passed," a plural is given an apostrophe, the wrong "its" is used, etc etc. This feels like a rough draft that needed a few more revisions.