172 Hours on the Moon - Johan Harstad

I had nightmares after I finished this book. I didn't realise it would be this creepy. I hadn't read any reviews, I had just heard a lot about this book and thought I'd give it a go. I kind of assumed they'd be going to the moon and found aliens- that was all I could come up with. That was definitely not the case.

This story is written in third person and follows Mia, Antoine and Midori, 3 teenagers who have won NASA's competition of the trip of a lifetime to the moon. Yes, 3 teenagers were being sent to the moon, along with 5 other astronauts for a mission.
I honestly thought that they would actually have a mission on the moon, but they didn't, as soon as they got there things started to get wrong and it became all about fixing the problems or leaving ASAP. So the mission went forgotten.

The characters were SO bland and plain, none of them had any personality at all, their background stories were boring and slightly pathetic. Mia wanted fame, Midori didn't want to be a typical Japanese housewife and Antoine wanted to show his ex-girlfriend what she's missing. Antoine came across as kind of creepy, spying on his girlfriend- and then once in the moon, instantly fell in love with Mia. It was so unrealistic and totally took 'instalove' to a whole different level. It was literally, instant.

The whole build up going to the moon was long, we didn't get there until practically halfway through the book, I kind of think it was necessary because you can't exactly just put 3 kids on a rocket and send them without any training or knowledge about anything- I think it could have been written a little better, and maybe gone into detail about some of the training they did, instead of skipping past it and saying 'they had a lot of books to read'.

The actual plot was slow, it was weird because not much happened until the end of the book, but throughout the whole book you were still slightly creeped out and wanted to push on to find out what happened- it didn't feel like you were pushing yourself to read, like it was a chore, but you definitely did realise that you had to keep going even if it was a little bit slow.

The ending oh the ending. I really loved the ending, I think it made the whole book just come together. When I finished I went straight on goodreads and gave it 5*s because the ending was fresh in my mind and I was literally just overwhelmed with shock and confusion and loss. I was really lost. But now looking back I'll have to lower the rating because of the other flaws I've thought about whilst writing this review.

It's definitely worth it to read this book just because of the ending. It was so so so good. I was mind-blown. Not a lot of books can make me feel like this one did!