Editor's Pick: What Goes Up by Katie Kennedy

What Goes Up by Katie Kennedy
Published by Bloomsbury on July 18, 2017
Genres: Sci-Fi
Pages: 336
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Action-packed and wildly funny, this near-future sci-fi features three teens on an inter-dimensional mission to save the world.
Rosa and Eddie are among hundreds of teens applying to NASA’s mysterious Multi-World Agency. After rounds of crazy-competitive testing they are appointed to Team 3, along with an alternate, just in case Eddie screws up (as everyone expects he will). What they don’t expect is that aliens will arrive from another dimension, and look just like us. And no one could even imagine that Team 3 would be the only hope of saving our world from their Earth-destroying plans. The teens steal the spacecraft (it would be great if they knew how to fly it) and head to Earth2, where the aliens’ world and people are just like ours. With a few notable exceptions.
There, the teens will find more than their alternate selves: they'll face existential questions and high-stakes adventure, with comedy that's out of this world.

In WHAT GOES UP by Katie Kennedy, Rosa and Eddie are juniors in high school and they’re smarter than you. They’re smarter than most people, and that’s why they’ve been selected to test for placement in a special division of NASA. If they place first and second, they’ll become the third team to be trained to make first contact with alien lifeforms. But in the midst of their testing and training, the unexpected happens, and it might be up to these teenagers to save the human race as we know it.

I really enjoyed this book. I was worried, when I started it, that it would be too sciency and it would go over my head, but Kennedy handles the science aspect very well. It’s obviously there; it would be jarring it if wasn’t. But it was never necessary for me to understand the science. I just had to believe that Rosa and Eddie understood the science.

This story is driven by the characters. You care about the journey that they are on because you care about them. Rosa, Eddie, and other focal characters like Trevor and Reg and Eddie’s grandmother, they are the focal points, and they are all drawn beautifully.

When the science fiction comes out in full force, and the aliens appear (as you know they’re bound to), and it gets all mind-twisty, I’ll admit that I got a little lost. But I was able to latch onto those central characters and keep reading, and I enjoyed even what I didn’t totally understand. Read WHAT GOES UP for the characters, and you won’t go wrong.

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Editor’s Pick: What Goes Up by Katie Kennedy

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