i absolutely hated the characters at the beginning but the creepy space plot ended up making up for most of if. this was a very rare instance of me not wanting to put a book down, but the problem is, the scenes that made me keep reading always got a time skip afterwards and we never figured out what happened. one character literally dies and comes back and it would’ve taken one sentence to explain that maybe it’s not actually them but for some reason they have the same name — but it’s not explained. there were also two very “wtf happened” and “wtf is going to happen” scenes towards the end. i’m kinda glad we didn’t get details because they alluded to SA, but also i wanted to know how we kept going from point A to point D. a lot of the crucial survival (where senna magically kept not dying and we never learned how) was skipped here. now for the characters: we have vaguely adult “cult girl” (this also made me want to learn a lot more about her cult but alas, we did not), a model, and a teenage boy who gets technology. i thought cult girl & tech boy (senna and han) got a lot more likable throughout the story, but the model (zurri) is just one of those badly written characters to me. she makes her entire personality being a feminist because she doesn’t “comply” …. when her entire job as a model is getting painful plastic surgeries, not eating or taking proper medications, and abusing drugs and alcohol so she could comply. these sides of her clash the entire time and are never addressed, but again her actions with the other characters made her more likable. i was scared this would be bad because of the whole “forget your trauma” plot, but i think it handled this surprisingly well and not in the way we always see (romance is not the solution!!!) and was a fun time. tw: continual theme of SA (not graphic enough for a kid to notice but enough for a teenager to think it’s implied), cults, drug & alcohol abuse