A Complicated Love Story Set in Space

Overview

Shaun David Hutchinson's novel strands three sixteen-year-olds — Noa, DJ, and Jenny — aboard a spaceship with no memory of boarding it and no clear sense of what lies ahead. Stripped of context and cut off from everything familiar, the three are forced to rebuild their understanding of themselves and each other from scratch, in a setting that offers no easy answers.

Within that disorienting premise, a quieter story takes shape: Noa and DJ begin to fall for each other, and their relationship becomes the emotional center of a plot that otherwise deals in mystery and dread. The romance unfolds under pressure, shaped by fear, curiosity, and the strange intimacy of facing the unexplainable alongside another person.

Hutchinson uses the isolation of space travel as a way of forcing his characters into honesty, and the novel moves between tenderness and unease as it withholds — then gradually reveals — what has actually happened to its three protagonists.

A Genre Blend with Emotional Stakes

The novel sits at an unusual intersection of speculative fiction and coming-of-age romance, using the disorientation of a science-fiction setup to strip its characters down to their essential selves. Hutchinson, known for blending genre premises with intimate emotional narratives, treats the spaceship less as a vehicle for action than as a pressure chamber — a place where identity, memory, and attraction can be examined without the usual social scaffolding of school, family, or hometown.

That structure lets the book pursue questions common to Hutchinson's other work: how young people come to know their own desires, how trauma and uncertainty reshape relationships, and what it means to choose intimacy in circumstances that offer no guarantees of safety or permanence. The result reads less like traditional space opera and more like a character study that happens to be set among the stars.

Why A Complicated Love Story Set in Space Has Been Challenged

Critics have generally responded to the novel's craft — its handling of mystery, its emotional restraint, and its willingness to let a same-sex relationship develop without treating it as a plot twist or a lesson. Challenges to the book have taken a different view, focusing less on how the relationship is written than on the fact that it exists at all. Objections have centered on the romantic and physical intimacy between Noa and DJ, with some challengers describing the content as sexually explicit or inappropriate for the teen readers the book is marketed to.

A related thread of criticism concerns the book's LGBTQ+ content more broadly, with some challengers arguing that same-sex romance itself makes the book unsuitable for school libraries or classrooms, regardless of how it is depicted. In the catalog tracked here, the book has been challenged or banned in 1 state and 3 districts, reflecting a pattern seen with other young adult titles featuring queer protagonists: the presence of the relationship, rather than any single scene or line, tends to be the underlying source of the complaint.