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Published: 2020 Acquired: July 2020 Read: August 2020 |
The third "Lady Astronaut" book takes place in parallel to the second, showing us what was happening on the lunar base at the same time Elma York was headed for Mars. This means a new narrator, Nicole Wargin, wife of the governor of Kansas; she was a minor character who I only vaguely remember from the previous books.
I found it tough to get into at first. Wargin herself I didn't find very sympathetic as a narrator, and though I think some of that might be gender bias on my part, I still wasn't enjoying the experience. I felt like her reactions to things were often off. The plot, too, took a while to become interesting; it seems as though someone is trying to sabotage the space program, but at first this is a repetitive series of dangerous incidents followed by people going, "Gosh, could there be a traitor?" But once Wargin gets into space and the polio hits the lunar colony, the book picked up steam, becoming a gripping thriller. The overall effect of the book is quite tense, and after an on-and-off start, I read it voraciously through to the end. I love space disaster stories, and this is a good one. There are also some pretty emotional beats that I did not see coming, and which really worked. The very last scene had me tearing up! And after not liking Wargin at first, I came to really understand her; Kowal does a good job of balancing all the different aspects of her psychology into a complete character.
There are two things that bothered me. One, I don't know why what Wargin did during the war was held back from the reader for so long; it felt contrived to do so. Two, I felt like it occasionally took the characters too long to think of solutions; four days of lost contact with Earth before someone looks through a telescope? But I liked this a lot, and in some ways it's more successful though I would say less ambitious than the first Lady Astronaut novel. I will probably put it on my Hugo nominating ballot.
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