ANYWAY.
The book I left behind aside from those two was the new Like Sisters. I was already spending enough money, as I bought three Hellboy plush dolls. I will get it eventually though.
So Luciana Vega. Luciana lives in Virginia. It sounds like it's coastal Virginia, though I don't remember any city name mentioned. Luciana's parents are both from Chile and all of her extended family lives there. She's eleven and she wants to be an astronaut or more specifically, the first girl on Mars.
Luciana's first book is about her six days at Space Camp. This was the far weaker of the two books. I do like Luciana's character a lot. More than any other recent GotY. I honestly don't think I've liked a GotY this much since...maybe even all the way back to Jess? But in the first book, she suffers from bad plot points. I'll explain, so expect spoilers.
Luciana's roommates are two sisters (Ella and Meg, who's only 9), their cousin Charlotte and a German girl named Johanna. Ella's really into space stuff like Luciana, but she is possibly the most insufferable know-it-all mean girl I've seen in AG. She's just a nasty, unpleasant girl who isn't happy unless she's the leader and everyone is following her ideas. Little Meg seems too young to be at Space Camp. She's scared of everything and makes a huge mistake that leads to the girls' robot team being disqualified. Charlotte is nice and tries to keep Ella in line. She's into programming. Johanna is my fave after Luciana. She's really smart, randomly speaks German all the time, and likes engineering.
Their days are divided up into basic Space Camp stuff and then working on their robot rovers for the competition at the end of camp. Ella clashes with Luciana, who won the right to be leader in a contest, and Ella has a constant battle going on with James, who's the leader of the boys' team and basically a male Ella.
The first major problem is that I find it flat out impossible to believe that Luciana, who is obsessed with being an astronaut, did not read every single piece of her orientation packet a million times over before coming to camp. Ella keeps lording it over her that she knows more than Luci does, and Luci makes several mistakes that she wouldn't have if she'd read the material. But I think this is a very weak and out of character plotline. If you want to be an astronaut and you're going to Space Camp, why would you not read everything they send you? The author needed to find a way to make Luci screw up and put their entire team behind, but she should have figured out something that didn't go this out of character.
The second major problem is that this book has not one but THREE mean characters. Ella and James are insufferable know-it-all control freaks. Noah is just a dick.
The third major problem is the missing part incident. Luciana has Meg, who again is NINE, take the most important part of their robot and put it in their box. Then they can't find it and end up getting disqualified after they sneak to the lab after lights out to check the boys' box, because Luci thinks they stole it. Ella ends up accidentally breaking the boys' robot and that plus the sneaking out equals disqualification. But it turns out the part wasn't stolen. Meg stuck it in box 8 instead of 18. Why didn't they think to check the unused boxes or ask Meg to get it from the box she put it in? It's played off by Meg saying "You SAID it was stolen!" and she assumed they looked in the #8 box, but...she was right there. How did she not see that they didn't touch that box? I really disliked Meg. She never did anything useful and acts awfully young for nine. Definitely far too immature to be on this trip.
The fourth and final major problem is that Space Camp does not make for a good book. You can describe things until the sun goes down, but I don't understand programming, I don't understand what a bunch of parts look like, and I only have the vaguest idea of their other activities and that's mostly thanks to that Hallmark Channel movie about the special needs kids who go to Space Camp.
All of this makes it sound like I hated the book. I hated the plot that surrounded Luciana, but I loved Luciana. Her family wants to adopt a Chilean orphan baby and she spends a good bit of her time wondering how that's going. She's overly concerned with being a good big sister and that's the part of her that I like. She's also feisty, but she keeps it mostly on the inside and only lets it out under more extreme circumstances. She's ballsy and she is a leader albeit a flawed one. But she's eleven. She's learning. She's a good character stuck in a bad book. So is Johanna. She was awesome.
At the end of the first book, Luci learns that her family is adopting Baby Isadora, but she's very sick with a heart condition. They're speeding up the adoption to get her to the US so she can have treatment.
The second book has Luci as one of only six kids chosen to be in the two-week CETUS program, where they will train for several days before going on a mission to the underwater CETUS facility. I liked this one a lot better, because Luci stayed in character and the plot points were believable.
Ella returns from the first book and she's mostly a much better character. But when the daughter of some big space inventor guy arrives, she goes all starstruck and latches onto her, supporting whatever she does, despite Luci's misgivings.
Claire is said daughter and she's a bunch of lies and bragging. They have to take three main tests before three of the six are chosen to dive to CETUS, leaving the other three as mission control. She sabotages one of Ella's tests, though she ends up passing and being on the dive team. Then she endangers Luciana's life. Yep, she was actually that bad. For that, she's made mission control and she joins a boy nicknamed Buzz, who's an excellent swimmer but discovered he was terrified of scuba diving. Luci and Ella's fellow dive team member is a kid so smart he's already in college. He was my second favorite character after Luci this time. The other boy doesn't get much characterization.
Luci struggles with three main problems in this book.
The first is Claire. She doesn't like her, Ella does. Claire tried to sabotage Luci first during one of the scuba tests, but she failed to succeed. Then she sabotaged Ella's treading water retest and Luci accused her of it. That made everyone not like Luci. But when she left Luci at the bottom of a 25-foot pool when she was trapped in a storage closet, everyone saw what she really was. She even admitted to sabotaging Ella at the end of the book when she got minorly redeemed.
The second problem is her worry about her little sister. Isadora has an operation scheduled shortly after Luci will get back from camp, but it gets moved up and she's 30 feet underwater during it.
The third problem is her minor claustrophobia, which was made worse by being shut in a closet underwater. She has a panic attack after awhile on CETUS and it's actually Claire that calms her and helps her stay the night there, although she's quick to return to the surface in the morning.
This book worked a lot better than the first, because despite the life endangerment, the plots were actually believable. It wasn't as confusing either. I could visualize and understand what they were doing the entire time.
Oh, little Isadora makes it through her surgery just fine.
Luciana's third book also sounds quite interesting with Claire making a return appearance.
So in short, the first book isn't very good, but Luci's character is, and the second is quite good. Both of these have me excited for the doll, who I'm definitely planning on buying now.
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