Jessica does not want to spend a year of her life on a planet in the middle of nowhere as her parents’ research assistant. But they didn’t give her any say in the matter. It’s a year that she has to spend away from her friends and her life on a planet with just the parents who left her six years ago. To get there, she needs to teleport—a process that involves sending quantum data through space and printing a person’s body at their destination, destroying the reference body in the process. Things don’t quite go as planned, however. Upon her arrival, Jessica finds herself on a crashed lander on the planet instead of in orbit nearby. To make things even weirder, the person she’s greeted by…is herself. Jessica needs to find out how exactly she ended up here, why she was printed a second time, and how to get herself home.
I found the premise for this book very novel in how they approached teleportation. Essentially, they create a clone of the person at their destination—which works out fine because the previous version of the person is destroyed in the process of capturing the data that is them. Because of this, Kirby was able to examine what happens when that process is disturbed, and multiple versions of a person are created at different times. I liked this unique approach to space travel, despite the concepts of clone agency being ones that have been played out before.
Conversely, I found most of the characters to be quite flat, boring, and, in some cases, unlikeable. All the characters were seen from a stereotypically sullen teenage girl’s point of view, which made them very flat and didn’t give them much depth. The most interesting character ended up being Duncan, the other teenager on the ship, mostly because she interacted with him the most and actually gave him some slack in her opinions. She, on the other hand, just seemed sullen and mean—even to herself. It made her less than likeable, which definitely colored my reception of the book.
When I was done with this book, I was left with the unfortunate feeling that it didn’t matter. Without giving anything away, at the end of the book, I was left wondering if the events of the book really mattered given how it all ended up playing out. I know that the end was definitely a commentary on the teleportation system, but in the end it made me feel like what I read was kind of a waste of time, especially as I wasn’t terribly enamored with the characters to begin with.
On the whole, I was disappointed with this book. Although it had a very promising and unique premise, I disliked Jessica and didn’t really feel like the story mattered to the fictional universe at the end of the book.
I found the premise for this book very novel in how they approached teleportation. Essentially, they create a clone of the person at their destination—which works out fine because the previous version of the person is destroyed in the process of capturing the data that is them. Because of this, Kirby was able to examine what happens when that process is disturbed, and multiple versions of a person are created at different times. I liked this unique approach to space travel, despite the concepts of clone agency being ones that have been played out before.
Conversely, I found most of the characters to be quite flat, boring, and, in some cases, unlikeable. All the characters were seen from a stereotypically sullen teenage girl’s point of view, which made them very flat and didn’t give them much depth. The most interesting character ended up being Duncan, the other teenager on the ship, mostly because she interacted with him the most and actually gave him some slack in her opinions. She, on the other hand, just seemed sullen and mean—even to herself. It made her less than likeable, which definitely colored my reception of the book.
When I was done with this book, I was left with the unfortunate feeling that it didn’t matter. Without giving anything away, at the end of the book, I was left wondering if the events of the book really mattered given how it all ended up playing out. I know that the end was definitely a commentary on the teleportation system, but in the end it made me feel like what I read was kind of a waste of time, especially as I wasn’t terribly enamored with the characters to begin with.
On the whole, I was disappointed with this book. Although it had a very promising and unique premise, I disliked Jessica and didn’t really feel like the story mattered to the fictional universe at the end of the book.