172 Hours on the Moon ~ Johan Harstad (eARC) review

172 Hours on the Moon
Tara F. Chace (Translator)
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
April 17, 2012
355 pages
add to Goodreads/buy on Book Depository/or Amazon

What better day to review 172 Hours on the Moon than the day that the shuttle Discovery made its way to the Smithsonian atop a specially outfitted 747? (And a Space Shuttle keychain is part of my SBBS Thank You giveaway, too.)

Hoping to renew interest in the space program - something that has lost both funding and public interest in recent years - NASA comes up with what seems like a crazy plan: they're going to send people back to the moon. Not just astronauts, either. They're planning to send three teenagers to the moon.

It's been nearly forty years since anyone last went to the moon and now Antoine, Midori, and Mia, teenagers from across the globe will travel there with trained astronauts.

Just before their trip, they each experience a strange, unexplained event . . . and they may be about to find out there was a reason it's been almost four decades since NASA has sent anyone to the moon.


172 Hours on the Moon, a Norwegian novel translated into English is an amazing, suspenseful and downright creepy read. I was drawn to it because I really do miss being able to see/hear shuttle launches (they're nice on TV but when you can literally hear the sonic boom and see the smoke in the sky it . . . can't be explained). While I knew this wasn't going to be a yay!space book, I was itching for anything spacey.

launch photos (please don't copy)

Little did I know this would also fulfill my need for a creepy/suspense/almost-horror read as well. And so well, too.

172 Hours does a brilliant job introducing us to Mia, Midori and Antoine before the launch (even before their selection for the trip) and then showing some of their training. While the suspenseful/scary parts of the book later on are fantastic they're made much better by the readers ability to be invested in the characters emotionally. Without that earlier information about each of the characters the later parts would be nice (and probably still have some suspense but have as much of an impact).

I haven't read this in the original Norwegian so I can't say how true the translation is but it reads incredibly well and sounds great. Both the author Harstad and the translator Chace have dome incredibly well.

The ending of 172 Hours on the Moon is superb. Everything leads up to it just about flawlessly and it ends with a knock out. I love it.


Rating: 9/10


They're TV/movies but if you like this you might enjoy Doctor Who (Fourth Series with David Tennant specifically) and possibly Another Earth

Books you might also enjoy: Human.4 by Mike Lancaster or Across the Universe by Beth Revis



thank you to LBYR and NetGalley for my egalley of this title :)