July 24th, 2008
by
Liz Henry
Somewhere recently I saw a description of Shangaied to the Moon by Michael J. Daley. It sounded so great that on impulse I bought it off the net and read it within the week. It’s a young adult SF book about a kid who wants to be a spaceship pilot, and it’s got the flavor of hard SF in that the kid waxes eloquent about the history of rockets and Apollos and Famousfakescientist-eponymous ramjets, interplanetary voyages, and the evolution of starship drives. The book struck me as a good combination of that sort of starship-crunchy story with a family centered story about identity and memory.
Here are some of the good bits, without spoilers
- a kid obsessed with a reality tv space adventure soap opera and its pilot hero
- the pilot hero not being quite what he seemed
- creepy computer brainwash “therapists”
- total information awareness, surveillance cameras everywhere
- hackers and counter hacking
- recovering memories. Kids and trauma.
- search terms monitored in realtime, getting around it, very Little Brother-ish
- a dead mom (booooo! as always!!!)
- a dead mom not being quite what one would think (Yay!!! as almost never!)
It was a tiny bit too intense psychologically for my 8 year old kid, but I would recommend it for 10 and up, or younger kid who can handle some questioning of sanity and scenes of trauma.
I really liked what was done with the character of the kid’s mom. It felt like a perfect analysis, YA style, of how women’s history gets rewritten or erased and can be uncovered and re-re-written.
It was particularly great when the kid is reading his mom’s journal (in one of the myriad copies of the journal!) and thinks about her as a person separate from her role to him with hopes and dreams and goals for herself.
The story was intense but quick & fun, had lots of scenes in space, dealing with weightlessness, and will make anyone of my geekiness and generation flash back to playing Lunar Lander.
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
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