When someone asks me what my favorite genres are, I usually don’t include science fiction — but lately, each time I sit down to read a science fiction book, I always enjoy it more than I think I’m going, and this one is no exception.
Sometime in the future of our planet, June is an absolutely brilliant young girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut like her uncle, whom she lives with after the death of her parents. After her uncle’s untimely death, her aunt sends June away to the astronaut training program at the boarding school named for her uncle, where she is the youngest student by far. While she’s there, struggling to make friends, the spacecraft, Inquiry, disappears, possibly because of problems with the fuel cells that her uncle invented but hadn’t quite perfected before he died.
Six years later, June is an astronaut in her own right, but she is still haunted by the missing crew of the Inquiry, and she’s convinced that they’re still alive. Even when no one else believes her, she fights to figure out how to fix her uncle’s fuel cells and bring them home.
I loved how the author of this book places the reader right into June’s head. Everything she thinks, you think. Everything she feels, you feel — her loss when her uncle dies, her awkwardness with her new classmates at school, her intellectual superiority to those around her, her frustration when no one listens to her because they see her as a little kid, even when she can see the problems in ways no one else can.
I also really liked the writing style. Others may find the lack of quotation marks confusing — I know it’s a pet peeve of several readers — but I felt like I was more in tune with June’s feelings because of the immersive nature of so much of the dialogue. Yes, it takes a few beats to get used to it, but once you get into it, for the most part I stopped noticing that the quotations were missing.
The time jump between June at school and June as an astronaut was a bit abrupt, and it was a bit confusing to figure out how much time had passed and to really see and accept June’s character as an adult instead of a child, but I think it was smart of the author to not bog down the reader with all the in-between. She wrote about the important pieces and left out the rest. I also didn’t love June’s romance later in the book. Yes, it humanized her a bit, but it did seem out of place for her character with her singular focus all the rest of the way through the book.
Overall, this was a book that I looked forward to reading every evening, and I highly recommend it.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and Random House in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.