Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have read many of Morgan Rice's fantasy books and have been generally impressed with them. That's why I "followed" her on both Amazon and Bookbub and jumped at the chance when notified of this new book coming out. But now I just wish I hadn't bothered. From the description I thought this book would be science fiction. Which I guess it is, but it's really more YA than anything else. Now I'm not against that, I actually read a decent amount of YA fiction. When it's done well it can be quite entertaining, but done badly it becomes far worse than intolerable. There is a trope in YA that is exceedingly common, to the point that people have often made fun of it for that reason. That being the scenario where the adults all act like idiots until the kids come up and show them the right way to do things. The problem with this trope is that it's completely unrealistic, but at the same time if you're trying to write a book where kids are the main actors and there are big global events to deal with then it's almost unavoidable. So good YA authors and editors find ways to hide it so the reader doesn't see it. But here instead, the author goes the opposite way and repeatedly bludgeons the reader with multiple occurrences of this same scene. Repeating it to the point where it almost seems like a parody. Almost, but the book isn't funny enough to be a parody, unfortunately. On top of that the adult characters in the story all feel like the same character there's very little individual personality other than that they have different jobs. Compared to Rice's other works, this just didn't feel like the same author at all. I started to wonder if she let her kid write it for her. At about two thirds through I was ready to give up on this book, I even came here and hovered over the review button for a bit. But I don't do that, so I trudged on and read the rest. Hoping it would get better. Alas, it actually got worse! I can't go into too much detail, because…spoilers. But for a book about SETI and decoding alien transmissions it just seems really cheesy to suddenly throw in zombie gas. Okay, she doesn't call them zombies but there's not enough of a difference to matter. And then there's a cliffhanger on top of that. Nothing resolves at the end, not even a subplot (not that there are any). Definitely not recommended. Two stars instead of one because I feel sorry for the author. And because at least the plot made sense, even if the writing was hard to stomach.