I’ll give it a four and a half rather than a full five only because the middle chapters introducing the curriculum and setting up the academy’s daily rhythms occasionally sacrifice pace for detail. There are a few passages where the technical worldbuilding slightly outpaces the narrative momentum. That said, Roy’;s instinct to ground every piece of world-detail in a character moment the suit inspection before the first day, Mustafa’s hologram of his hippocampus, Mr. Bearhaw’s mechanical horse Star becoming translucent to show its endoskeleton keeps things from ever feeling like an information dump.

And when the story locks in during the trail ride and the events that follow, the book becomes properly hard to put down. Francis’s arc from guarded and privileged to genuinely open is handled with real subtlety. Magzi’s growing friendship with Kitto feels like the beginning of something that could anchor an entire series. I am very much here for whatever comes next.

I’ve been burned by middle-grade sci-fi before beautiful premise, flat execution. This is not that. From the very first page, where we learn that two spacefaring civilizations existed sixty-six million years before humans even arrived on the scene, Roy commits fully to his world and never lets go. The Natatory are not just “the alien group” they have history, technology, culture, art, and a whole underwater civilisation that feels as real as anything on the surface. And then you have the Nordics, who colonised Mars first and carry that pride like a bruise. Putting twenty teenagers from these two worlds in the same classroom on a neutral planet and saying “figure it out” is such a quietly brilliant premise. I was emotionally attached to Magzi, Kitto, Marco, Bert, and even the stiff and secretive Francis by chapter four. Buy this book. Read this book.

I don’t know how Joël Roy did it, but he wrote a phonetically transcribed rural accent into this book in a way that made me laugh every single time instead of grinding my teeth. “Yaour limao is braoken, yaou see” is a sentence that will live in my head rent-free for the foreseeable future. Mr. Applebaum arriving in a hovering farm seeder to collect a group of interplanetary students because the proper limousine broke down is the kind of absurd, warm, completely human detail that separates a good book from a great one.

But don’t be fooled the comedy earns its place because the stakes are real. These kids are carrying the weight of a war their parents fought. The peace is fifteen years old and still fragile. And somewhere in that bay, something large and grey with no fins is lurking close to the academy. Roy balances all of this with remarkable confidence. An absolute joy of a read.

Twenty years in a classroom and I can count on one hand the books I’ve immediately wanted every student to read. This is one of them. The Mars Academy curriculum mixing Nordics and Natatory students for survival training, geology, engineering, astronomy is basically a masterclass in what cross-cultural education could look like when done with genuine intention rather than tokenism. Principal Montgomery is the administrator I aspire to be: firm, perceptive, warm underneath the professionalism, and quietly watching every student with a level of care they don’t yet know she has.

What moves me most is that the collaboration isn’t painless. The students resist. They cluster with their own kind. They make assumptions. They have to be assigned seats before they’ll even try. Roy doesn’t pretend integration is easy or automatic he shows the work, and that honesty is what makes the eventual moments of connection so genuinely earned and moving.

The world Roy has built is not a utopia. The war between Phaeton and Europa ended fifteen years ago, but the scars are visible everywhere in the holograms of the destroyed JoPro space station displayed at the spaceport, in the way the Phaeton president takes pains to emphasise that Mars was colonised by Nordics first, in the way the Natatory students and the Nordic students instinctively separate themselves the moment they enter a room. Peace is a process, not a moment, and Roy seems to understand that better than most writers twice his years in the genre.

The fact that this nuance is delivered through a story about teenagers learning to ride horses and smuggling goldfish onto spacecraft is a remarkable feat of tonal balance. Roy never lectures, never simplifies, and never lets the politics swallow the humanity. The book trusts young readers to hold complexity and they will.