This book just... didn't work for me.

A good part of the book is sort of a Agent to the Stars meets Ender's Game setup where a group of student diplomats doing a first contact training exercise turn out to be working on a real scenario. It's also about the pop star Owen, who is secretly an empath(?) alien trying to bring the world together, for reasons.

My grumps here are mostly that the characters were flat and universally good-natured, and most of the action proceeded by telling via dialogue instead of showing, and the combination of this left most of the book feeling quite dry. What little tension and politics existed seemed to happen off page and in a not particularly threatening manner.

One minor example of all of this is that Owen is admonished quite a bit to be "glue not god" with his powers, and there's a mention of his father abusing power, but there's never any threat or even temptation for him to be anything but kind. I think I had expected a little bit more from this angle of the book.

Karen Lord's previous The Best of All Possible Worlds had a similar vibe in some ways, but worked much better for me (at least in my memory).