I love this book!Contagion is a YA space thriller very reminiscent of the Alien movies. The pretty sci fi cover originally drew me in, but when I read what it was about it definitely seemed up my alley and it was! This is the first thing I have read by Erin Bowman and I cannot wait for the sequel in this duology, which is set to release next year. This also makes me want to read her other works while I wait for the second book!

Hevetz Industries is an energy company that drills the largest amounts in the system of a renewable energy source called corrarium. A large part of the Hevetz company is also dedicated to research as they find new planets and ascertain whether they contain any corrarium and how the company is effecting the environment. One such team is currently evacuating a planet due to severe weather conditions when they get a distress signal from a far away planet. Being the closest, it is their duty to answer the distress signal, but under their current circumstances the crew that gathers together for the mission is a bit rag tag. Only one of the team has any search and rescue experience, the pilot is under a sort of trial period of flight, and one member is just a young intern trying to add something to her resume to get into the college she wants. But the group is also in a rush to get off planet and gets swept along without much explanation.

They soon find out that they are on their way to a planet that everyone believed had been disregarded as not worth the trouble, long ago. The S.O.S. Is coming from a Hevetz drill crew called Black Quarry that was on a classified job there. This planet has extreme weather conditions and is in a tidal lock with it’s sun. There is a thin strip of median where people can work and one previously known attempt at research done there. All that’s left from that time is a single survivor and plenty of rumors.

In fact, the sole survivor, now an older doctor of the Hevetz company, is one of the rescue crew headed to the planet now. If the rumored stories and distance (necessitating cryo) weren’t enough to have the crew on edge, the state of the Black Quarry drill crew’s ship, once there, definitely gives them something to think about. The Black Quarry crew has experienced something quite unexpected and the rescue team truly has no idea what they are getting into, at least for the most part.

I love the perspectives in Contagion, which come from the varied array of characters on the mission. They are diverse and convincing and the jumping from one POV to another contributes a lot to the build up of suspense. I really appreciated that of these characters there was some POC and LGBTQ representation. There was also a good representation of different age groups and careers and specialties within the company, so all in all there was a very rounded view of the occurrences in the story. Even with there being a larger number of perspectives, I still ended up enjoying the characters a lot.

The suspense build was multi-faceted and excellent. I’ve already mentioned how the POV swaps added to this sense of suspense but this was merely a piece of creating the tension. The way we learn about the characters is another factor. Instead of learning a lot of background information at the beginning, we don’t know very much at all and slowly pick up information along the way- often from what other characters pick up about each other. So we never know anyone’s full story and often we know only what others infer about each person. Add to this the rumored stories of what happened the only other recorded time Hevetz had anyone on this planet. At first the rumors alone create a sense of mystery and a need for caution, but as the characters begin to piece together the truth of what happened, the sense of danger increases.

Most of all though, it’s the writing style that is able to have you there on the edge with the rescue crew.It takes a lot of skill to write this many character perspectives well, to build suspense, to create a mystery that will have the reader guessing up to the very end, and to leave that reader eager for a second book. And I for one, cannot wait for the second book! It’s even more difficult because the ending was sooo cliff-hangery!! In the meantime, Contagion gets a 5/5 stars from me! ★★★★★ ( )

Ok, why not. A YA zombies in space. Yes, I like zombies, I like space. I'm not super good at listening at fiction but this was ok, there was enough going on so my mind didn't wander off. Nothing to write home about, but I did like this. ( )

3,9 stars

I ended up liking this book a lot more than I expected! I went in to it with pretty low expectations, as I only realized this is YA when I picked it up, and have pretty poor experiences with YA sci-fi from past explorations.

However, in my opinion, Contagion avoided some (though not all) of the most obvious pitfalls this genre usually falls victim to.

While it never ceases to be a ridiculous concept that teenagers have anything to do with things like working full time in research (be it as interns or full fledged members of a team) I decided to look past it in this case. Mostly because the teenagers in questions weren't as obnoxious as usual. While the main character had to endure the usual derision for her status, she also didn't consider herself an adult or an expert. She did end up miraculously saving the day on a couple of occasions, but it wasn't completely fantastical or unbelievable.

The thing I liked the most was the romance. To be more precise, that it didn't exist. I'll be very surprised if Thea and Cohen won't end up together in the next book, but to have an entire book to set up the premise for the relationship is so uncommon with YA that I'll allow it. (In that way, this book was so much better than the Illuminae Files trilogy, which was basically a series of romance novels set among space adventures with cool formatting and an AI system (that was also soiled in the end.))

The plot wasn't anything too original, but the pacing of the book was good and the story was interesting enough to keep me interested enough to basically finish it in one sitting. The writing could have been more complex and I would have liked this a lot more if it was geared toward adults (a bit more grit, a bit less melodrama). The characters were interesting enough, even though a little caricature-y.

Looking forward to reading the second part this summer. ( )

This is SUPER well-written, a sci-fi zombie story set in space where a rescue crew is sent to investigate a drill site that has sent a distress call. This site is located two MONTHS away by hyper-space, and they’re the closest crew, so you get a real sense of the isolation. It’s set on a barren, violent-weather-tortured rock and as soon as the crew gets there they can tell something is Not. Right.

The pacing is amazing, both the sense of suspense and “what the heck is going on here?” as the crew finds clues and throws out hypothesis, and then once things “come alive” and the chaos picks up. Totally creepy and awesome! And oh the twists. Oh the awesome science and cool plotting that has gone into it, and the nifty way the character backgrounds intersect. This was so great and I can’t wait for the sequel!

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. ( )

I docked a star because it's the first in a series and I truly believe it would have been a wonderful standalone, and we need more standalones in the world!

But this book ticks all my boxes: space horror, incurable super contagious disease, people stranded on an abandoned dark spaceship being picked off one-by-one and hunted by the shells of those they thought they knew... there's no way I could have disliked this book.

Yes, there were stupid decisions made (Thea even mentions that, if this were a horror movie, she'd be telling the characters to turn back), but the motivations were clear. Dylan really wanted to prove herself and redeem herself to her father, and so ignored all common sense and was determined to be a hero. Her crew, even though they hated almost every decision she made, did eventually follow her orders, because she was their captain and that's a hard thing to ignore. But even when they tried to make the right decision (going back to the Odyssey eventually, refusing to trust the stranger they found), it still comes back to bite them.

Of course, I knew almost right away that Dr. Tarlow and Coen were infected in a different way, but, as this is a young adult book and since it didn't really affect how I read the book, I didn't mind. It was a really interesting idea that the virus was looking for young hosts - hopefully that's explored a little more in the second book, since it almost but not quite makes sense. Why is a young host more ideal if it can spread so easily? Why is a young host more ideal if it has no problem living on in Dr. Tarlow even when she's old? What does it have to do with the seaweed? ( )