Wednesday, June 15, 2022

2022 book 101

 Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars

I binged For All Mankind over the past week and was jonesing for more stories about alternate space races, so decided to give this series a try. But like, if you’re going to call your series LADY ASTRONAUTS, you need to introduce lady astronauts sooner than 2/3 of the way through (or maybe I am just spoiled by For All Mankind). Things start strong, with a giant meteorite wiping out a lot of the east coast, and the protagonist and her husband are Jewish, which obviously I am here for, and it’s all super compelling! Even the math talk is interesting! But it kind of bogs down in the middle, spinning its wheels with the protagonist's issues with anxiety and with her awareness of being a clueless white lady. It’s weirdly repetitive and boring? There are so many secondary characters with the potential to be interesting but there is no real character development for any of them. By the end I didn’t even care if any ladies went to space. Not sure I’ll read the next one. B.

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