The UN has declared war on the planet, and world’s space agencies have drafted twenty-four teens as candidates to prepare the Jupiter moon Europa for humanity to resettle there. Two of these teens are Naomi Ardalan, a Persian-American science prodigy, and Leonardo Danieli, an Italian championship swimmer. But where Leo is thrilled to leave Rome — and Earth — to seek a new future, Naomi is filled with distrust. Both are thrust into the International Space Training Camp, where they’ll compete with the other 22 candidates for a spot in the Final Six to go to Europa — but soon discover the opportunity to travel to a new world comes with incredible risk.
When I initially began reading The Final Six, I thought I was about to get into a hopeful story about space exploration — but what I found within the covers ended up being anything but. Leo and Naomi are competing for spots on a resettlement mission — not to push the boundaries of what humanity can do, but to save it from the planet it was complicit in destroying in the first place.
The publisher’s summary of The Final Six made the story sound suspiciously like the setup of The Hunger Games — which, frankly, is a series I truly dislike — so I was surprised to discover this novel is incredibly different in premise and worldbuilding. Whereas The Hunger Games fails to create a plausible dystopian world, the apocalyptic landscape of The Final Six is one that readers may already recognize: a world where near-daily devastating natural disasters have numbed humanity almost beyond repair.
Her words trigger my memories of seeing the tsunami all over the news, the horror my family and I felt at the photos of the carnage. But by the next day, there was a new disaster to report, and the world quickly moved on from mourning Singapore. You become numb to the daily tragedies, until the next one happens to you.
Monir packs a terrifying vision of deadly natural disaster into this horrifically plausible near-future sci-fi tale, and the suspenseful cliffhanger ending is bound to leave readers clamoring for the next book in the series.
The author also does a great job building the cast of characters to represent a truly diverse mix of humanity, from athletes to scientists from all across the world, and she weaves their backgrounds and abilities into the plot in a way that’s both useful and intentional. The Final Six has already been optioned for film, although I’m incredibly hesitant to see what Hollywood might make of this incredibly diverse novel.
Though I wouldn’t say the writing in the novel is at an especially high level, the worldbuilding is definitely something to write home about, and Monir’s characters are wonderfully created. The novel holds a dismal future, but it serves as a cautionary tale about the future Earth faces without changing how we treat the environment. I would recommend this book as a way to introduce younger teens to the hazards of a potential environmental apocalypse.
4 out of 5 stars
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