You can't convince me that this book wasn't at least inspired by Among Us. Like the character's name is Asuka but they call her Susie? They talk about throwing people out of the airlocks, and the vents are mentioned so often it's kinda sus...

The book does a pretty good job of straddling the line between futuristic and not so scifi that it's not even earth anymore (I can see something like DAR becoming real in the future). I thought the relationship between Asuka and her mother was portrayed really well, and there was a good amount of topics discussed without bringing the pace down too much, though that meant they weren't covered in too much depth. My biggest problem was that the stakes never really felt high, so I never really felt any tension. I'm not even going to call everyone's immaturity a fault; a mission run by people trained from like age 12 to simply be the smartest they can be with very little experience outside of simulations is clearly going to have some petty issues. This is the quality you can expect from something dreamed up by a trillionaire. Also, since pregnancy during the mission was such an important part of the plot, I wish we would have gotten a little more about it in the chapters set in the past. Clearly everyone is really on board with the idea, but I would have appreciated an actual conversation to show how everyone got to that point. It just rubbed me the wrong way how those ethics are completely glossed over.