The Deep Sky

ARC Review of The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

“Who was she in this room, in this city, in this country, in this world? Lost.”

If the Earth was failing (more than it already is), and you had the chance to escape and help build a new society on a faraway planet, never seeing your family and friends again, would you take it? This is the choice that Asuka, the main character of The Deep Sky, makes. That choice, and everything that comes after, changes her life in ways she did not anticipate.

On a dying Earth, a company called EvenStar has put together a space exploration program designed to take 80 fertile and highly trained women to another planet to start a new civilization. They are tasked with populating this new planet and representing the countries that sponsored their mission. But first they have to get there, and that’s a tough task to accomplish when there may be a traitor on board. A traitor who set off a bomb, blowing their ship off track and killing three women. While efforts are being made to fix the damage, Asuka, a biracial Japanese American who has been sponsored by Japan, is told to play detective and get to the bottom of the explosion and who caused it. But with tensions both nationalistic and personal growing among the crew members, Asuka herself is also under suspicion while she investigates. What should be simple turns sinister when internal systems start to malfunction—and did I mention there’s an all-knowing and ever-present AI on board?

To me, the standout element of this entire book was Asuka. She felt so well-developed and real. One of the main things that Asuka struggles with is her identity as a biracial Japanese American, and it is especially exacerbated by the fact that each of the women on the crew is supposed to represent a single country. Asuka has a hard time reconciling her feelings of never being enough with being the sole representative for a country whose language she can barely speak. We get to see what Asuka’s life was like well before she becomes a part of the crew, and she struggles with her identity at every turn. She has such a hard time figuring out where she fits in, what’s she’s good at, and what her purpose is, even after she’s accepted to the program. She’s accepted as an Alternate, meaning she was not the company’s first pick, which underlines to her how she’s not good enough. On the ship her only purpose is to pick up tasks that her crew members need help with, meaning she has to pretty much be an expert at all tasks. But instead of seeing this as a good thing, a thing that sets her apart and makes her useful, Asuka sees it as something else that makes her an outlier.

On the surface, The Deep Sky is a literary sci-fi novel. But there are horror elements that creep in and make the whole reading experience quite unsettling. I loved it! My favorite kind of horror/sci-fi mashup has spooky shenanigans happening in space, and The Deep Sky definitely had that! The setting of the spacecraft with only 80 people basically made this a locked door mystery where anyone could be the perpetrator, and Kitasei did a wonderful job inserting tension onto the spacecraft. There was nowhere for the crew members to escape to, and that resulted in the narrative feeling deliciously claustrophobic. While reading I was fully invested in the plot and characters; even the side characters had well-developed backstories that enhanced the overall narrative and Asuka’s experiences with them. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed The Deep Sky and I cannot wait to see what Kitasei writes next! This was a phenomenal debut and I believe that Kitasei is poised to make waves in the sci-fi genre.

**ARC provided by the publisher, Flatiron Books, in exchange for an honest review**