Book Review: 172 Hours on the Moon, by Johan Harstad

THAT COVER

Do you know this feeling when you know, deep inside, that you're about to read a book that you're going to love? That waiting for a year before reading this book will be SO worth it?

And finally, you read this book and you don't like it? 

Well, that's exactly what happened with 172 Hours on the Moon.

I had heard really good things about it and, to be totally honest, they were useless: because the cover itself had already convinced me to buy it.

Antoine, Mia and Midori, 3 teenagers, are the luckiest people on the world: they won the lottery held by the NASA and will be able to spend 172 hours on the moon on a very special expedition ! The aim, as it is claimed, is to "get a whole new generation excited about space exploration". But it turns out that the moon hides many secrets that should never be discovered... 

The premise sounds amazing, doesn't it?

It definitely is. The thing is: that's all. 

The book is split into 3 parts: "the earth", "the sky" & "afterward". To be honest, I was more intrigued by what was happening on earth than on the moon.

I had heard that this book was "absolutely thrilling and terrifying": it didn't thrill nor terrify me. And God knows I'm easily scared. 

One of the bad things about this book, people say, is the bad character development: I didn't, contrary to many people, find the characters "plain" or "flat"; true, they were not the greatest characters of all time, but when you read YA, you know that it is a thing that may happen. It could even be a very interesting point of the plot to not know much about them, nor to understand them very well. But the plot does not allow them to live. 

Then, the plot itself: it is a great idea, really; but it didn't work for me, mainly because everything happened too fast, without any real motivation.

People like to call this book "sci-fi": it is not. It is not, because sci-fi books are usually complex, the authors like to give many scientific and technologic details that you don't understand and probably won't remember once you've finished the book but that really make sense while reading it, and that help you get into it. I felt that this was missing for the plot to work.

As for the "MAJOR PLOT TWIST"... Well, maybe it's because people had told me so many times that a major plot twist was happening that it was not major nor even a plot twist for me, but I really knew what was coming. This is not a problem in itself: the problem is that I felt that it happened for no reason. The plot twist is supposed to be motivated, or to lead somewhere, but I felt that it was just there because it had to be. 

To sum up, here are the main ideas.

I LIKED:

• the cover, it's gorgeous, never change this 
• the plot idea
• the romance which, for once, was totally acceptable (even if predictable)

I DID NOT LIKE:

• the plot development
• the lack of detailed information about pretty much everything
• the lack of link between things
• the "plot twist"

I think that the main problem, once again, is that this book was really too short. A hundred or so more pages and maybe it would have worked better, everything would have made more sense in relation to everything else. The other main problem is that I had SO high expectations that the disappointment was huge, bigger than if I had read it without really expecting anything from it.

(it would actually be a 2,5)