I geek out on sci-fi but don’t read it as much as I should. The Deep Sky has reminded me just how much I LOVE this genre, especially since it was also parts thriller & horror 👩‍🚀

I really vibed with Kitasei’s writing and kept highlighting lines! Books about our near-future life and climate are sometimes too scarily close for comfort (when does it shift from dystopia to reality?), yes, but they’re so important and thought-provoking 🌎

I also really enjoyed the mystery about who planted the bomb, Alpha’s dry humor, and Asuka’s journey to find her identity 🤍

Read this if you like:
• Climate dystopia
• AI, like TARS in Interstellar
• Badass women trying to save the world
• Locked-room mysteries (we’re talking millions of miles into outer space locked) 😳

I love genre-blending books- a space opera, post-apocalyptic adventure, and a thriller mystery all rolled into one? Sign me up. Yume Kitasei is a debut author to boot, but I could barely tell. The pacing was near perfect and the characters jumped off the page. I was enthralled from the first page. This is the perfect mix of timely climate warning, science fiction, and deeply engaging mystery. I couldn’t put it down. Grab this if you’re looking to expand your horizons.
This will be published in the local paper next month.

I was nervous when I first started this book because it ended up being way more science based than I anticipated and I typically struggle with those types of sci-fi stories. But I ended up being able to follow (mostly) what was happening and I ended up really enjoying this sci-fi murder mystery story about a spaceship being sent out to save humanity and the people who don't want it to succeed.

The beginning was a bit slow to get into the story, but once I hit the 30% mark it was pretty smooth sailing and I enjoyed following Asuka as she tried to figure out who had sabotaged their ship and killed three of their crew members. I also really enjoyed the flashback sections leading up to Asuka being chosen as the alternate candidate for the space mission to save humanity. It gave more backstory as to why her and the other characters were making the decisions they were making in the present timeline, their dynamic as a group, and how Earth was becoming uninhabitable.

I couldn't give it the full 5 stars because some of the plot points were never full tied up or explained and while the murder mystery set on a spaceship was really fun to follow and try to solve, it could've been executed better.

Will definitely be checking out Yume Kitasei's future books!

Thank you to NetGalley for the e-arc! All opinions are my own.

This (literally) starts with a bang and keeps running, with great world building helping to make the story feel urgent and some great twists and turns that give this a little bit of a whodunnit feel.

Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky is both beautiful and haunting – an ode to the unknowable vastness of the stars and the increasing longing of humanity to travel among them.

Told in alternating flashbacks from present to past, this novel follows the story of main character, Asuka, a young Japanese American woman belonging to an 80-person crew, trained from childhood for this mission among the stars. Asuka’s present is stark, the atmosphere of the story claustrophobic and thick as tensions rise throughout the ship and crew in the wake of an explosion that has knocked them, and possibly their entire mission, off course. When it’s discovered that the explosion has killed two of their crewmates, mounting suspicions add to an already unstable mix of emotions, resulting in the forming of factions among the crew. In an effort to figure out who was behind the attack, Asuka is tasked to investigate both ship and crew.

As Asuka’s investigation plays out, we are treated to flashes of her memories before the crew undertook this journey through space and time – including a bleak picture of life on Earth as climate change continues to contribute to climate catastrophes and natural disasters; the elite program they all joined as young children, the sole purpose of which was to send this crew on a one-way journey to a new planet, a desperate last hope; and the increasingly fraught politics steadily leading to a global conflict. Kitasei shows us in this novel both the hopes and dreams of humanity, as well as humanity’s explosive destructive potential. We see this play out globally in the past and present, through Asuka’s memories, and, on a more intimate scale, among the crew.

The last pages of Kitasei’s novel will leave you with an achy feeling of longing and unbearable hope – for the characters, and for humanity as a whole.

If you enjoy reading psychological thrillers, space thrillers, or love that eerie creeping feeling that comes with the unease of never quite knowing the whole story, I would highly recommend The Deep Sky.

Thank you to Netgalley and Flatiron Books for this digital e-ARC to read in exchange for an honest review.

This great debut novel focus on the near future where our planet faces a complete climate crisis, and a billionaire recruits international teens along with funding from all major nations for a space expedition to bring humanity to a habitable planet. In what feels like an academic and training hunger games with candidate daily ratings, hundreds of potential teens get whittled down to 80. The nations providing the funding getting to pick their delegations. The teen delegates get sequestered to an abandoned small liberal arts campus for their teen years, and powerful friendships as well as enemies form.

Asuka, our half Japanese and half American heroine raised in the United States, competes for a position on Japan’s team. Her Japanese Mom, a climate activist, deeply opposes her going. And humanity seems split on those dedicated to trying to fix Earth and those giving up. Asuka ends up getting selected as a last-minute substitute for a girl who dropped out of the flight, and unlike others gets trained as a generalist to sub in for others during the mission instead of being a specialist.

Controversial issues thread their way throughout the plot: all the women on the flight are expected to bear children from a sperm bank to jumpstart populating the new planet; ramped up geo-political war on Earth between China and the U.S. spills onto the nation-based crew and their two ship leaders who represent each country.

Midway through the space journey, a deliberate explosion kills three members of the crew and knocks the spaceship perilously off course. Asuka, who witnessed the explosion during a spacewalk to identify an unknown object on the outside of the ship, sets out to as the generalist find the saboteur.

Suspects emerge and revelations abound, pulling you into the hunt for the bomber as well as the plight of the ship given its off-course heading.

Looking forward to reading more from Kitasei!!


Thanks to Flat Iron Books and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Unfortunately despite an interesting premise and a gripping beginning of the story this book ended up not working for me in the end.

I didn't particularly like Asuka and didn't enjoy being in her mind as the narrator and never found myself invested in her as a character at all. I also didn't find myself interested in any of the other characters. They honestly felt fairly interchangeable and I kept confusing who was who in regards to their relationships with each other. They also, in the current timeline, were supposed to be in their 20s, but the drama on the ship all read as very juvenile still which I did not particularly enjoy.

I was somewhat interested in the whodunnit aspect of the plot, at least enough that I did finish the book instead of DNFing, but overall ended up finding the plot pretty boring for a large chunk of it as I didn't particularly care about the flashbacks since I wasn't attached to the characters at all.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei. It has been a long time since I was drawn to a science fiction novel... dare I say... years. This book was the the perfect one for me to dip my toes back in. I really enjoyed how this story was about so much more than the challenges at hand in space. It covers everything from geopolitics and climate change, to fertility and close relationships. While this book is in many ways a whodunnit, Kitasei does a great job of making that element more of an underlying plot device, rather than the sole focus of the book. Lastly, while I don't know much about birds, I liked how they were used throughout this story to leave clues and give deeper meaning to certain passages. I'm sure a bird enthusiast would get even more out of those passages, but I enjoyed them all the same. I hope to see more from this author in the future!

4.5 stars: this is an absolutely fantastic debut novel. There are great sci-fi elements, environmental collapse, themes of race and belonging, a diverse group of characters, and an interesting mystery.

Asuka is among 80 people sent on a ship to a new planet, a last ditch effort to save humanity after environmental disaster and war. But then, the worst happens and a bomb kills three people, and everyone is left wondering if there’s a traitor among them. Asuka is tasked with getting to the bottom of the mystery.

The story unfolds in the present day after the bomb and flashes back to Asuka’s childhood and the program she went through to be selected for the mission.

Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books!

The sky is certainly deep, and so is this book (although not literally, its probably average length). Characters are really the name of the game in this one.

I wrote about this on The Storygraph and on Goodreads with a link sent to Twitter. Note that I decided to listen to this via audiobook instead of reading. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5711806349

It's always a bigger let down when you have such high hopes for a book. The Deep Sky was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and it just fell flat for me. Character driven narratives are my bread and butter, but I fell into the unfortunate circumstance of not really caring for the main character Asuka, her motivations and her relationships. It felt like my enjoyment of the book was hinging on caring about Asuka, and when that wasn't my reality it really hindered my overall experience.

There was a lot of give and take for me between things I liked and things I didn't. The science is always what gets me if done well, and I was very intrigued by integrated and immersive virtual reality. But I just had no patience for most of the characters and their whims.

I felt like there were a lot of loose threads worth exploring that frayed out, and for a conflict where lives depend on resolution, nothing felt particularly high stakes to me at any point. Also, I could see whodunit from a lightyear away.

Overall, this one just disappointed me more than anything because my expectations were let down. I would definitely pick up from this author again since I think she has a voice worth reading, this one just didn't end up doing it for me.

Thank you to Flatiron Books and Netgalley for the ARC!

The Deep Sky is the kind of book that will stay with me for years to come. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I can put all my feelings into words, there’s an aspect of this book that you simply have to experience for yourself.

When I first came across The Deep Sky, the stunning cover immediately caught my eye. It’s beautiful, full of the human longing for something bigger than ourselves, and unexpectedly layered – exactly what The Deep Sky is as a story. When I began reading, I expected a thrilling mystery on a spaceship tumbling off course into darkness. What Yume Kitasei delivers is an enthralling locked-room style mystery but also so much more. The Deep Sky is so achingly human, so intimate and connected in the face of the isolated void of space. It’s a stunning debut with complex characters, a twisting mystery, and a delicate mastery of craft.

Within the fast-paced mystery, Yume Kitasei finds pockets of slowness. Barreling through space in one moment, we are brought back to Earth, grounded in flashbacks filled with sensory memories.

I love a story told non-linearly, in this case with flashbacks. Yume Kitasei handles this dance across timelines with ease and playfulness. Ultimately, the way she weaves sensory experiences into her writing is truly magical and the standout quality of this book.

We get to know the world and its characters through their senses. Both on the Phoenix and back on Earth, Kitasei roots us into the characters’ experiences by exploring their lived-in reality. This makes The Deep Sky incredibly immersive. I have rarely read a book that managed to transport me into a world with all my senses as intensely as this one!

All the sensory details were my favourite aspect of this story. The prevalent use of augmented reality that provides all crew members with their own worlds was a delightful way to explore different settings in the confinement of a spaceship. Additionally, it was a unique way to get to know the various characters through their personal worlds. Ultimately, when Asuka’s augmented reality program malfunctions and she gets access to everyone else’s when she touches them, it creates this shared reality that’s strangely intimate.

Asuka is both Japanese and American, a two-fold identity that contributes to her always feeling out of place and less than. I appreciated how nuanced Yime Kitasei explored Asuka’s feelings regarding her heritage and that at no point either side of her identity feels less important. Asuka gets to exist, in all her multitudes as a complex person.

This complexity was what drew me to Asuka. Yes, I find her constant sense of imposter syndrome deeply relatable. But I particularly loved how Asuka truly gets to contain multitudes and be a jack of all trades. She thinks she’s only good at surviving, but what she really excels at is adapting and solving problems of all kinds. Seeing her grow into those skills and gain confidence across the twisting events of the story was delightful! Additionally, I will always be invested in (and cry about) complex mother-daughter relationships and Asuka’s strained relationship with her mother took me by surprise. I thought it was executed with such nuance and yes, it made me cry. A lot.

I can’t talk about The Deep Sky without at least mentioning how diverse the cast of characters is! Considering all crew members are required to undergo artificial insemination and raise children, it would be easy to assume that this is an all-female crew. However, the Phoenix’ crew includes a range of gender identities, including a trans man (who happens to be German which was particularly delightful to me, a fellow German). The queerness and variety in gender expression are woven into the fabric of the world in a way that made my heart sing!

Ultimately, I adored all the characters in this book. They’re so vibrant and complex in their identities, if not always likable. I found myself invested in all of their stories and rooted for them to save their mission.

Somewhere in here, there’s a joke about hope and birds, I’m sure of it. My favourite unexpected part of The Deep Sky was the role birds played in the story! If you have ever wanted to learn about birds as a fundamental metaphor for the human relationships in a story, you’re in luck.

The Deep Sky examines humanity at its best and at its worst. In the face of climate disaster, the nations of the world come together for one last ditch effort to save themselves.

But they are also waging wars, destroying the planet, and playing political games. This book wonderfully represents the complexity of humanity, our need to survive, and our longing for something greater than ourselves. The story oscillates between intimate, tender human connections and estranged relationships, reaching across the spectrum of human experiences.

Despite the tense moments and the race against the clock, the destruction of the Earth below: The Deep Sky is a fundamentally hopeful book. It looks at our humanity and our past with a critical eye but also with tenderness. In all the horrors of the world, Yume Kitasei finds beautiful, human moments. The shared glances, the chocolate cake, the promise to create something new.

Overall…
The Deep Sky will have you glued to the page until the very last chapter. Yume Kitasei weaves a space mystery that ambitiously explores earthly disasters and political turmoil, human relationships, and the responsibility we share for each other.

{3.5 stars}

"All authority is fiction."

--------------------

Asuka is an alternative on a space mission bound for a new planet to help humanity start over. It's her job to fill in any other role when needed. That and the fact that she was the last selected for the crew has left her with a chip on her shoulder. When a bomb goes off killing three crew members, she is the one tasked with solving it. As her investigation continues we are given flashbacks to her path to joining the program and ultimately ending up on the ship.

I think I would have liked this one more if I hadn't figured out the culprit pretty early. I liked Asuka and her methodology. Not the smartest in the room but the most resilient. Her arc with her mother and the politics back on earth were pretty interesting.

Read this one if you liked Artemis or The Apollo Murders.

Thanks to Flatiron Books for the gifted copy. All opinions above are my own.

I'm a huge sci-fi fan. Any adult sci-fi that sounds good, sign me up. (Don't get me started on YA.) So I signed up for <i>The Deep Sky</i>. The story follows Asuka, a half American, half Japanese woman part of a crew on a mission to save the human race by repopulating on Planet X. When an explosion happens killing one of the crew, everyone is a suspect.

If you've read other sci-fi books with generational ships, there's a sense that you're drifting through space in a rather large ship. <i>The Phoenix</i> is supposed to be a large ship, but it never really felt like it. After all, a ship where women have to raise their newborn children on the ship should be big. Which brings me to the next point. There's a rather unsettling fixation here with pregnancy (which by the way really needs to be listed as a content warning and it's not). I understand the purpose of the book is women becoming pregnant and repopulating. And I assume that these women were selected because they were the prime candidates to do so, but this book has a rather large number of it's crew pregnant that it almost seems comical. What's worse than that though, is I didn't really like Asuka, the main character! That's a big problem. Yes, I get it. She constantly feels like an outsider no mater where she is. Where does she fit? Will she ever? After a while, it started to grate on me. And remember what I briefly said about YA books. Asuka felt like a YA character to me. I will say, she's the only character who's truly fleshed out. All the others felt like cardboard cut-outs to me. Because of this I lost interest in the story and didn't really care who sabotaged the mission.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC. I wanted to like this book. I really did, but in the end, this just wasn't for me.

3.5⭐️

If you want a thrilling space mystery with hints of societal commentary on the environment and radicalism, this is for you. The thriller was really high stakes as bombs in space are horrifying, which kept the page turning. I don’t know if the flashbacks to the school was quite necessary, but that could be a me thing.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an arc in exchange for my review. The book comes out today!!

A space explorer discovers that someone connected to the one-way mission wants to sabotage it. As she investigates the other explorers on the spaceship, she fights her insecurity and memories of her estranged mother. Author Yume Kitasei employs an impressive amount of scientific knowledge without overwhelming readers while also offering a compelling plot in her debut, Deep Sky.

In the near future, Earth is suffering through the worst of the climate crisis. Technology has advanced far enough for major nations to combine their finances in final space mission: sending 80 female graduates of an elite decade-long training program on a one-way trip to Planet X in a distant galaxy. Representatives from several nations have been chosen to continue the human race somewhere else.

Asuka represents Japan, even though she’s only half Japanese herself. Estranged from her mother, Asuka leaps at the opportunity to try out for the mission. Never mind that she’s only 12 years old at the time and needs parental permission. More than anything, Asuka wants to leave everything behind and start over.

Despite her severe doubts in her ability to last beyond the first week, somehow Asuka manages to make it through 10 years of training and competitions. A last-minute snag means she gets on the mission to Planet X just before it takes off. Her mother disapproves strongly, but Asuka doesn’t care.

She boards the shuttle with 79 other females; some are friends, some are rivals, and some are complete strangers. After going into hibernation for 10 years on the shuttle, the crew have all now been awake for 11 months and settling into life in space. Even though they know it’s a one-way trip, tensions still exist. Political loyalties and personality clashes keep the tension simmering.

Even now that she’s on the mission, Asuka still feels out of place. When she and her friend, Kat, go on a space walk outside the ship, a bomb goes off and kills Kat. Asuka manages to make it back inside the ship alive and relatively unharmed, but the ship has been knocked off course and needs a correction as soon as possible or the crew won’t reach Planet X and will be stranded in space forever.

Suspicion runs rampant about how the bomb detonated and how it came aboard in the first place. Two additional crew members died in the blast, including their captain. The new captain puts Asuka on the task of finding out whether anyone on board knew about the explosives, as much to test Asuka’s loyalty to the mission as to keep her occupied with something productive.

As Asuka begins to investigate, she can’t help but reflect on what brought all of them on the mission in the first place. Is it possible the clues to their current predicament are in her memories? Why does her personal tech keep glitching, leaving her unable to experience virtual reality like everyone else? What happens if one of the crew members is responsible for the bomb—what do they do then?

Author Yume Kitasei writes with a confidence and assurance that other debut authors would do well to embrace. Despite the technicalities of flying a one-way mission in space, Kitasei takes her time to explain everything along the way. A handful of the asides feel slightly awkward, more of an information dump rather than an organic part of the narrative, but the majority of them fit right into the story.

Kitasei’s protagonist is a winner all the way around. Asuka matures from a tween to a grown woman through the pages, and readers will find themselves compelled to keep reading to stay with her. Her estrangement from her mother is heartbreaking and even frustrating at times, as strained relationships often are in real life.

The plot falters a little toward the end when the culprit is revealed and the crew come up with their plan to correct the ship’s course. With the buildup throughout the novel and some clever plot twists along the way, some readers might feel slightly underwhelmed at the solution. By that point, however, Kitasei has built a strong enough protagonist in Asuka that most readers will stick with the book until the end to find out whether the mission is abandoned or the crew keep going.

Those interested in science fiction that makes space travel seem realistic will enjoy this one.

The Deep Sky is an intriguing mystery set in a space ship, giving it an isolated setting, locked-room style that served to build tension nicely. The ship has left a struggling Earth in pursuit of a new Earth-like planet to set up a colony world and continue the human race. In support of this effort, the ship is crewed entirely by people who can carry pregnancies and each crewmember is required to carry at least one pregnancy during the journey. This setup stretched my suspension of disbelief just a bit. Though I have not experienced pregnancy and do not have the capacity to, from what I understand it is hugely impactful on one's physical abilities and state, and at worst it can be downright debilitating. Here we see crewmembers going into labor at inconvenient times, or simply being ineligible for tasks due to their pregnancies. On top of this questionable choice by mission control, all crewmembers experience the ship's environment through a system called DAR - an augmented reality system that masks their environment to whatever they prefer to see. Our main character sees forested pathways filled with a variety of birds, and the ship AI recites bird facts to her to soothe her anxiety. Because of DAR, no two crewmembers see the same ship and when things start going wonky there's an added layer of confusion and uncertainty caused by the DAR that often broke the tension of a situation for me.

Crewmembers were trained from childhood through application to an elite private school, followed by years of eliminating those who weren't top performers, who had any sort of illness that may impact them or their ability to carry a pregnancy, or were too politically active. When we see them on the ship, they are young twenty-somethings, but much of their behavior and interaction feels juvenile. I will say it was mostly believable given the setup, but it still grated a bit on me. Complaints aside, the mystery was compelling, and the story does touch on the eugenic-like selection process, the traumas the school put them through, and some interesting political imaginings given the state of the world. I enjoyed a lot about this book, and it proved to be an engaging read overall.

I very nearly gave up on this book early on because I didn't find some of the worldbuilding believable, things that felt particularly off because there's a mystery at the center of the story and half the battle in a good mystery is laying a trail of clues--and, more importantly, missing information. But the information has to be seamlessly missing, explainable in a way that makes sense within the world but ambiguous enough not to become a flashing neon sign that gives the game away.

Kitasei's execution in this regard was lacking, in my opinion. I find it hard to believe that critical areas of a ship would not be under constant surveillance, or that crew members wouldn't have basic biometrics like fingerprints on file. Once I got through these clunky early mechanics, though, the dual-timeline story did manage to pull me in. I wanted to know who sabotaged the ship, and while I wasn't surprised by the answer, I was surprised by the reasoning behind the sabotage.

Beyond the mystery, Kitasei explores quite a few intriguing subjects, including our propensity to escape reality, the ethical dilemma of staying on Earth and trying to fix it v. leaving and trying to colonize other worlds, and the age-old complexity of mother-daughter relationships with a healthy dose of trauma and survivor's guilt as complicating factors. All in all, a good read.

I received an eARC review copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I read this book a bit ago but held my review to drop around the release date.

The book appealed to me/I requested a review copy because it sounded similar to Red Rising blended itself with Harry Potter.

Perhaps because I had just finished reading Golden Son, but I found this book to be a good-but-not-great experience, and there's nothing wrong with that, it just didn't hit as well with me. The main reasons this YA sci-fi novel wasn't a hit for me were that the setting and the timelines didn't blow me away

3.5/5 stars (rounded to 3).