Planetfall

This was not what I was expecting. Let me tell you, if you're expecting something similar to her Split Worlds series, you are in for some culture shock, my friend.

Planetfall was shockingly intense on an emotional level. It uses the sense of being alone on a new planet to create a claustrophobic, paranoiac sensation, and it ends sharply right where most stories would pick up– I don't know if this is intended to be a series, but I sort of hope not, because the feelings of “but, wait, what about–?” feels very apropos for the emotional tone of the novel. The slow build-up of fear and despair as the novel progresses, culminating in Ren's final choices was gripping. I'm not much into the genre of science fiction exploring the mental problems of its protagonists, but I honestly couldn't stop reading.

Also, I'm a little startled at how little the sexual identity of the main character has been mentioned in other reviews. I mean, I love it. Renata, or Ren, Planetfall's point of view character, is clearly bisexual or lesbian, but it's treated the same way a heterosexual character would have been in the same situation. She was in love with the key person who sent them off to this world beyond earth, and she's had an (unfulfilling) sexual relationship with one of the doctors. But while the relationships affect her, and up the emotional ante of the plot, her identity is not treated as a plot point. This is a prime example of “write your characters as people first”.

The book wasn't perfect. I would have liked a little bit more detail about Ren's past relationships, and how they fed into the person she becomes at the beginning of the novel. She had a child who died, for example, but it's only touched on briefly, and we learn nothing about the child at all. Same with her relationship with her family, and, most damningly, her relationship with Suh. While this tendency to glance over her past relationships feeds into the sensations of dislocation from both past and future, it can make Ren a frustrating cipher at times, which is a problem in a first person POV novel.