The sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission to save both humanity and the earth, Ryland Grace is hurtled into the depths of space when he must conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

We were not a fan of Weir's follow-up to the Martian. The premise of the book was alright in the world-threatening dilemma it creates, and there's a moment of first contact with an alien that is handled in an interesting way, but there are just too many flaws in this book to redeem it. Most of us were along for the right until about the halfway point, when the story just becomes unplausible and the twists too much to stomach. There's science underlying this book, but some of the chances that would have to go right for things to happen, namely how the junior-high-school teacher protagonist becomes the co-savior of two species is just ridiculous. And the dad jokes -- oh, the dad jokes. Every character has almost the same sarcastic, take-'em-down-a-notch attitude with just straight-up dumb dialogue. The ones of us who didn't enjoy half the book caught this tone in the first few pages and just groaned through the whole book. The second half is essentially a buddy cop movie with an alien and you just want to groan the whole way through it. Part of the problem is tone; the leaning into the aw-shucks DIY budget MacGuyverisms just don't work. But the other problem is the scope. The Martian worked because the stakes were personal, and thus relatable. Threatening two whole species should have made the story more dire, but instead it just got flatter. Of course all of humanity wasn't going to die. Of course the 'suicide mission' would turn out ok. Without a burning sense of risk, it's just a pile of science lessons and bad jokes, and that is not a compelling novel. Skip this one and save yourself an agonizing trip.