Bookish Thoughts

Mary Robinette Kowal has a deep compassion for her characters that puts me in mind of Lois McMaster Bujold. It's not that nothing bad ever happens, and there are certainly forces outside of anyone's control making life harder. But she does a great job of humanizing every single character, of making you feel empathy for them and understand their choices. Of pulling happy endings out of a series of compromises and disappointments. Things don't turn out exactly the way you want them to, but they turn out well nonetheless. This is especially apparent in the character of Stetson Parker, who Elma has clashed with since the very beginning. His character arc is possibly the most satisfying one in the entire duology as Kowal deepens and softens him, expands on his back story while also finding ways for him to grow. He's not perfect - no one in these books is - but I ended up really liking him by the end. It's amazing, considering how much I hated him in the previous book. ...

If I know you in real life, there's a solid chance I'm buying you this book for Christmas. It's got elements of Contact , Hidden Figures , and The Right Stuff , all wrapped up in a fantastic story that had me crying in all the best ways. The story opens in 1951, with a meteorite landing on Washington D.C. and taking out most of the eastern seaboard. When it's realized that this is likely an extinction event - an extended winter followed by rising temperatures that will eventually make the planet uninhabitable - the space race kicks into high gear. But in this timeline, it's not about being the first to set foot on the moon. It's about figuring out how to establish colonies on the moon and possibly Mars so that humanity keeps going. At the center of all of this is Elma York, a brilliant mathematician and pilot who wants nothing more than to be an astronaut. But this is still America in the 1950s, and despite the stated goal of establishing a colony on the moo...