Gave up a little over halfway through. Some YA books are great, just featuring YA characters but otherwise telling good stories with good plots and good character development and dialogue. This one has none of those. The story isn’t compelling, nor are the characters or dialogue. I kept going for a while since the idea and setting seemed interesting, but then all the badly done parts overwhelmed the idea. ( )

I loved this! Cool space adventures with lots of neat worldbuilding, queer and trans representation (and a bunch of other representation too, even just among the human characters), young people figuring out their personal stuff at the same time they have to deal with giant universe-threatening stuff, yes! And that ending... there's so much more story to tell and I'm super stoked for the rest of the series. ( )

Representation: Side Black and Asian characters
Trigger warnings: Death of a friend, gun violence, explosions

5.5/10, this book is getting boring, the plot drags so much and all the characters felt so flat, might be because there were so many characters there wasn't enough pages to make them develop. It felt like Tina and Marrant were the only main characters in the book, and the rest of the characters were just side characters. Elza was acting very preachily, since she was talking about Black culture erasure, which has no place in this book, and she isn't even on Earth! The romance felt very flat as well, and Tina's thoughts felt a bit giddy and dorky, while Elza was this annoying brat who used her trauma as excuse for her behaviour. There has been a lot of death as well, five side characters in this book were targeted and killed by Marrant, but I couldn't care less about them. At least the action develops after 300 pages, but interestingly, there was action at the start as well. I highly doubt that I would pick this one up again but I might read the next two books in the series which look interesting to me by the way. The cycle time system was confusing, why not just use the normal time system used on Earth? ( )

Overall an enjoyable read. Keeping in mind it's YA it just wasn't what I was hoping for.

The cast was pretty fun, but kind of shallow in some ways. We got a ton of details on this aspect or another and next to none on others.

If YA was my genre I'd likely be at least moderately excited for the next installment. ( )

Tina is a clone of an alien general, hidden away on Earth. Once activated, she eagerly accepts her destiny. However, that destiny doesn't quite work out as she (or anyone else) expected.

Queer coming-of-age story/space opera with major The Last Starfighter vibes. Very enjoyable. Lots of different aliens, both cute and horrific.

I heard Charlie Jane's voice in my head as I read it. I later listened to an excerpt from the official audiobook; its narrator is really good and makes different decisions than the Charlie Jane voice in my head. I liked it. ( )