Thirteen-year-old Houston Williams is smart. Very smart.

So no one is surprised when he earns a scholarship to attend a prestigious NASA space camp. At the training facility he immediately bonds with his new team, including a girl named Teal. He also clashes with a girl on a rival team named Ashley, who matches or beats him in every exercise. The three of them impress the directors so much they are invited to join a top-secret research project that studies how space travel affects people of different ages. But only two of them will actually be going into space. Houston will do whatever it takes to make sure he’s picked.

T-10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 blast-off. It’s most kids’ dream to have the extraordinary opportunity of a voyage into the depths of space.

Houston, Is There a Problem is told in first-person point-of-view featuring protagonist Houston, and two exemplary main characters accompanied by the pure essence of friendship that binds them together.

Throughout the story, the characters and their personalities are almost perfectly constructed and developed in great detail. The insight into their background makes these characters extremely relatable with their own specific flaws and virtues. These attributes make one invested and empathetic with the developing characters in the book.

The pace of the story is adequate for the development of the plot and characters. However, I feel as if it could have been more prolonged, rather than having a somewhat abrupt and sudden end, which broke a steady flow of natural emotion.

The book is intended for middle-grade readers. However, in one specific scene the two main characters share a silver flask of cherry brandy. Though it was necessary to develop the background of the characters and contribute to a reader’s empathetic relationship with them, the events that followed emphasized the fact that it is okay for children to drink at an age as young as 13. Also, this scene was a bit redundant, and the author could have used other ways to show the background of one of the main characters. However, despite this, kids ten and up should be fine reading this amazing book.

Personally, as a 16-year-old, I immensely enjoyed the book and its characters. I would definitely recommend it, and am looking forward to the sequel, Boldly Go.

– Dev Nair