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Space Case (Moon Base Alpha, #1)

Stuart Gibbs

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Feb 08, 2019 thefourthvine rated it it was ok

Shelves: sff, queer-disinterest, childrens-teen

I read this book to see if my son might like it, and maybe he will, but this is definitely not one of those middle grade books that works for adults, too. The plot is simplistic, the worldbuilding is deeply flawed, and the ending is ... well, bad. (No spoilers here, but: it’s bad, people.)

Dashiell is a 12 year old who lives on the moon, where everything is extremely boring and awful. (And fair play to him: the base sounded claustrophobic and dangerous, plus poorly designed, and it is deeply ridi I read this book to see if my son might like it, and maybe he will, but this is definitely not one of those middle grade books that works for adults, too. The plot is simplistic, the worldbuilding is deeply flawed, and the ending is ... well, bad. (No spoilers here, but: it’s bad, people.)

Dashiell is a 12 year old who lives on the moon, where everything is extremely boring and awful. (And fair play to him: the base sounded claustrophobic and dangerous, plus poorly designed, and it is deeply ridiculous to think that NASA would have allowed children to live there.) But then the base’s doctor dies, and he has a Mystery to Investigate.

Okay, so first, the plot. Mysteries are hard to plot, and maybe Gibbs gets better at it over time, but this one is basically “Dash observes an adult doing something that adult would never do” times 12. There’s not very much there there. The fun of a mystery is in the picking up of clues, and there just ... aren’t very many. And the few puzzles there are are easily solved.

And the worldbuilding is just a straight-up disaster. Going by the date on the documentation in the book, this is set in 2040. Dash is 12. So he’d have been born in 2028, nine years from now, and fourteen years from when this book was published. That’s plenty of time for technology to change (although the only major changes are that most people use smartwatches instead of smartphones, and that VR is considerably better), but not a lot of time for humans to change. And yet humans have changed more than technology. The changes are mostly ridiculous, but the one that really bothered me was the revelation that sign language barely exists, because deafness, blindness, and other disabilities are cured at birth. Even if this was true — and it couldn’t be, given that the description of curing deafness was “giving them a cochlear implant,” which is not just boom! Now the kid is hearing! — there would still be living deaf people, ffs! There would still be a lot of speakers of ASL and other sign langauges! People would still be teaching babies sign!

And despite all this weird, improbable change in humanity, this book is still set in galactic suburbia. There are no queer people. And although all the characters are of various shades of brown, they all live in a whitebread American culture. It’s just frustrating and thoughtless.

Basically, if you want a middle grade mystery, read the Wells and Wong series. This one has the depth of a teaspoon. ...more

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Feb 27, 2018 Liz rated it liked it

Shelves: 3-star, sci-fi, middle-grade-fiction

I wanted to rate this one more highly but the twist at the end felt too sudden for my tastes. This will be a hit with kids who want lots of adventure and humor.

2 likes · Like · see review