Achilles

Overview

Set in 2221, Achilles follows Jonah Lincoln, an orphaned teenager among a wave of young colonists recruited to resettle the planet Thetis after a disaster kills dozens of the original settlers. The voyage aboard the Mayflower 2 is meant to be Jonah's chance at reinvention, a way to become the capable, self-assured person he never managed to be on Earth.

That chance is cut short when the ship crashes before reaching its destination, killing half those aboard and stranding the survivors not on Thetis but on its moon, a hostile, unpopulated body called Achilles. The moon's terrain and creatures prove far more dangerous than anticipated, and the story's tension builds around the group's uncertain path back to their intended home.

The situation worsens when the adults who survived the crash vanish without explanation, leaving Jonah and the other teenagers to organize themselves and confront the possibility that Achilles is not as empty as they were promised. As the first installment of a series, the novel sets up questions about survival, leadership, and hidden threats that presumably carry into later books.

A Survival Story With Horror Undercurrents

Achilles belongs to a lineage of young-adult fiction that strands its characters far from adult authority and forces them to build order out of chaos, a premise with roots stretching back through decades of survival and dystopian storytelling. What distinguishes Boose's approach, based on his earlier work, is a willingness to lean into genuine horror and dread rather than softening the danger his characters face.

The novel arrives as a series debut, positioning it to expand a larger world across Thetis and its moon in subsequent volumes. Its premise of a failed colonization effort also taps into enduring science-fiction preoccupations with humanity's fitness to settle new worlds and the fragility of the institutions meant to protect the vulnerable, here embodied by teenagers suddenly without any functioning adult oversight.

Why Achilles Has Been Challenged

Boose's prior work has been praised for its unflinching, fast-moving intensity, and Achilles carries that same sensibility into a young-adult setting where its content has instead drawn scrutiny. The novel has been challenged or restricted in 1 state and 1 school district tracked in this catalog.

Objections to the book center on its graphic violence, including the deaths of numerous teenage characters and encounters with predatory alien creatures depicted in visceral detail. Some reviewers and parents have also raised concerns about the book's overall tone of sustained peril and horror, arguing that its intensity exceeds what they consider appropriate for the younger end of the young-adult readership, particularly given the age of its central characters and the absence of adult protection within the story itself.