The Final Six (by Alexandra Monir)

The Final Six has a really fun premise: 24 teenagers are competing to be the six who get to fly to Europa to colonize it.  Only perhaps the mission is more sinister than it seems!

Our two point of view characters are Leo (a boy from Italy who has lost his family in a climate disaster) and Naomi (a girl from a Persian-American family in Los Angeles), and over the course of the competition they fall in love.

So many ways in which this book let me down. We don’t get to know any of the other characters, except for Beckett, who is basically a cartoon villain. (It’s improbable he even sticks around, because teamwork is essential to a group of astronauts and there is no way someone with Beckett’s attitude would make it past the first round of cuts.) Leo and Naomi fall in love, of course, except there is no chemistry and I see no real reason they even like each other. The pacing is off.  Some of the things described as part of the training seem to violate the laws of physics.  (Speaking of which, in The Martian it takes like three years to get to Mars. In this book they don't even mention how long it's going to take to fly to Jupiter. I want more science in my sci fi, damnit!)

The second book in the series is available from the library but after reading reviews I’m going to skip it.