Rocket Girls is a Japanese young adult science fiction novel that had a second life as an anime TV series. It pays some homage to the American and Russian space programs, though some of the plotting and details require considerable suspension of disbelief. Here’s the setup: Japanese teenager Yukari travels to the Solomon Islands looking for her father who abandoned the family years before. She finds him hiding out as a village chief, but she and her half-sister are shanghaied by a Japanese company that needs a healthy person weighing under 48 kilograms to test their space capsule and their underpowered unreliable rocket. Humor is over the top and it reads like the anime it eventually became. 3.5 stars. ( )

Since every kilo you send to orbit is astronomically expensive, the astronauts of the future are the lightest fully functional human beings -- Japanese schoolgirls.

"Rocket Girls" strikes an odd balance between perving out about its protagonists and fleshing out their characters and motivations. They have agency, but they spend a lot of time being leered at as they wear skintight spacesuits.

The treatment of the Solomon Islander natives is bizarrely racist. They are naive, magical, ignorant, happy, one-dimensional. And naturally a Japanese man is their polygamous cult leader.

The higher-ups in the book behave in very unethical ways without obvious repercussions. Kidnapping and similar non-consensual approaches to recruitment are routine in the organization depicted.

The book is a neat bit of fluff, but not of the same calibre as Issui Ogawa's Next Continent at all. ( )