How could I not fall in love with a book about space, astronauts and family? Beautifully written and just magically told. Loved, loved this.

Five stars.

THIS BOOK. Wowza. The first thing you should know about this book, other than the fact that it has an absolutely gorgeous cover, is that you should almost entirely disregard the synopsis. This fictional book is about June, the niece of famous space engineer Peter Reed. We follow her from age twelve when she is just a smart, curious kid who is fascinated by the failure of the new Ingenuity space mission, through her journey of becoming an astronaut herself whose genius will help solve a flaw in her uncle's fuel cell design. Through it all we learn about what it's like to train underwater, to breathe the salty air on the newly discovered Pink Planet, and to go through the physical challenges of life in outer space.

The synopsis mentions romance and intrigue and mystery, and while there are brief touches of each of these things, the story is more of a study of our main character June and her development over the years. Her daily life is explored in great and careful detail, a feature that might bug readers if they are expecting something vastly different. The narrative is also written without quotation marks.

I love the creativity of this story and the vivid imagery in its pages. I felt like I was there, problem solving alongside June and her friends. Though the end was a little infuriating in its abruptness, I also think that the conclusion achieved what it needed to relevant to June, and I am okay with that.

The best part of this story is the synopsis.

The worst part? The dialogue has no quotation marks. You have to pay attention and filter out action from words and all I'll say is I'm glad this was a short read. But if that's a deal breaker for you, now you know.

This would probably make a great movie as there is some <i>The Martian</i>-esque similarities as far as disaster and thinking on your feet but in space. But where I hear the book THE MARTIAN is as good as the movie, in this case, were this ever to be adapted, the same would not be said.

What I did find interesting were the literary paralells to a beloved classic, which I did not pick up on until quite far into the story, but once I saw I couldn't unsee. It doesn't stick to said plot 100% -- it couldn't -- but where it can, it does. I didn't hate it but it didn't salvage this, either.

This is a story I wish I could've loved because of the interesting plot/themes but the execution, and main character, and lack of punctuation, really dragged down.

I had had mixed feelings about her first one but I decided to give her another chance. Like the first story, this is also a bit of a mixed genre. A bit of romance and a bit of coming of age and a bit of science fiction.

But I loved this one.

The beginning of the novel reminded me a bit of Ender's Game. She goes to the academy, she's much younger than the others and really smart. I really enjoyed this early years section and how she navigated some of the issues she faced at the school.

The second part is when she's 18 and now she's an astronaut and I loved this part too, especially once I figured out how it tied to some of what she did in part one.

and the last part is when she's visiting the pink planet to try to bring it all together. I thought this part was in some ways the weakest, especially the semi-anti-climactic ending.

But I still loved the time I spent with this story. It was quiet and sweet and interesting. And clever.

with gratitude to netgalley and Random House for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am not a space nerd, but I loved this book. My heart screamed noooooo when I turned the last page and saw "acknowledgements." There should of been 10 more chapters, I need more time with June. She is everything I love about a main character...flawed, brilliant and determined.

I loved Kate Hope Day’s last novel, so I was intrigued to read this one. Another book that is intricately woven in a way that makes you think about the world around you. I like how this book explored space in the general as well as specific sense. Good read!

The deal: The blurb on the back of the book says it’s what happens when “a young, ambitious female astronaut's life is upended by a fiery love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew.” (I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for this review.)

Is it worth it?: Not particularly. At least it’s better than The Martian, though, in terms of balancing extensive explanations of engineering with actual character development. I genuinely thought it was YA until the “fiery love affair” happened somewhere around the 60% mark when June (the female astronaut) suddenly goes from precocious kid to grown lady in space. So while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, I still hope someone buys the rights post-haste because it’s going to make an excellent trashy Netflix series.

Pairs well with: do they still make dippin dots?

C

What a great book!
Set some time in the future with more space travel taking place, we follow June as she grows up and becomes an astronaut. She is a very unique character that I quickly adored.
Enter a lost spaceship, Inquiry, and her personal quest to fix their fuel cell based on her uncle's designs and you are immersed in a tale of drama, outer space, full of action, some romance albeit a bit misguided, and suspense. I can easily see this becoming a movie!
Great read, very fulfilling and will make my top 10 list this year.

I really enjoyed this! I was looking forward to it after getting the last book of hers on NetGalley as well. I really enjoyed when she was younger and the story built so well from there. I loved the ending, great read.

This is a story about a curious mind & the spaces it can create.

I enjoyed all the components of this book... but didn’t really enjoy the book as a compilation of those elements. I love dystopians, I love science fiction set in space & I love character driven sci fi.... but this just didn’t work for me. The characters felt self absorbed & irrational, and there was no chemistry in the interpersonal relationships. The writing style wasn’t a good fit for me, but I hope everyone else will enjoy it!

Thanks to Netgalley & Random House for this e-ARC!

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House and Kate Hope Day for this ARC. As I saw in other reviews, I did feel like this was literary fiction, presenting as Sci Fi...so I can understand how the pacing may have been off for some. For me, it actually flowed quite quickly. However, in the end, I found most of the characters unlikable or childish, and had a hard time staying in the story or really caring what happened.

Wow. I never thought I needed a book that was The Martian meets Jane Eyre, but here it is and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The pacing and short chapters make this book inherently readable, and June is a fascinating protagonist. I devoured In the Quick and look forward to more books by Kate Hope Day.

For some reason, I really loved the cover of this book. You never see pink associated with astronauts! The figure seems to be falling away from the cover and beckoning you in.

So I was fine with reading this slightly alternate history. I wasn't sure about when the book was set, but it seemed a bit retro. However, in this book a new pink planet has been found and crewed ships have just begun exploring the solar system.

At the beginning of the book, this manned exploration team has fallen out of contact. June, the main character, lives with her uncle. Her uncle is a brilliant scientist who developed the fuel cell that the exploration ship used. This uncle has also been teaching June how to think like an engineer, or an inventor. He encourages her to take things apart to see how they work, to think through alternatives until she hits an obstacle and then either find a way around that obstacle or find an entirely different path.

This uncle has recently died and June's aunt and cousin don't seem to be kindred spirits to her the way her uncle was. In short order, June is shipped off to the boarding school at the base for aspiring engineers and astronauts.

So far, so good. I don't love reading books that bring you all the way from childhood through the adult main character's life. To me, it seems like a waste of time and a good author could start you where the action is and allow the reader to learn backstory later, as necessary, and more organically to the plot. But I could get through a bit of backstory to get to the good part.

But more and more time with June as a child! What did she eat at the cafeteria. How did she learn to scuba dive (which seemed suspicious to me; the kids learned in a pool and then "dropped weight" in order to rise. But scuba divers don't drop weight when they're diving, they decrease the amount of air in their BCDs.) Did June make friends. More and more of this. It was all so... mundane.

So I skipped ahead. And even in space, time is given to June brushing her teeth (and not in a exciting space way). To what June is eating. To her learning how to deal with people. To June continually focusing on the immediate problem and not understanding the larger situation, in which she might be putting people in danger by dealing only with the immediate problem. It still felt... mundane. None of the wonder of space. Just immature people misunderstanding each other again and again.

So, the novel wasn't really about space. It was about a young neuro-atypical woman who leverages her strengths but doesn't understand her weaknesses. And no one tells her how to. This is literary fiction dressed up with a science fiction ribbon. And I've got a short tolerance for books like these because rarely is the science aspect up to par.

I really enjoyed The Martian by Andy Weir so I had high hopes that this would be in the same vein. Unfortunately, I had a hard time relating to the main character and I never really lost myself in the story. There were a handful of characters throughout and they were not fully developed, making it hard for me to root for or against them.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

An engaging story of an awkward orphan focussed on engineering and problem solving. While I was reading this, and when I finished, I completely enjoyed it. If you’re looking for a light, easy read, this is it.

As long as I stayed within the world of the novel, I was fine. But as I’ve tried to write a review, I’ve realized that while it’s fun, it isn’t something I’ll come back to and reread, or recommend to others, unless someone asks me for a light science fiction read.

I have trouble describing the plot. The overarching theme, I guess, is June’s persistence in paying attention to the problems of the ship Inquiry after most people have willingly forgotten it. A secondary theme might be her seeking out the kind of people who will value her.

It may be a coming of age story, but there doesn’t seem to me all that much for June to overcome. Her aunt and cousin don’t know how to value June, but her aunt knows enough to send her to the space program’s school, and June seems to find her place there easily. She doesn’t like the program’s decision to cancel the rescue mission for <i>Inquiry</i>, but she doesn’t try to fight it either. She simply completes her program of study and goes where she is sent, which, fairly shortly, sends her to the place and two of the people who have been trying to solve <i>Inquiry</i>’s fuel cell problem.

I expect science fiction to explore inner or outer worlds, and this novel doesn't do that with much depth.

Stripped down tale of space exploration, love and loss. Very well conceived of and put together. I particularly enjoyed the writing style changing so subtly but pointedly when June ages by several years between parts of the book.

The reality of space exploration and the risks involved are never down played. But the author also grants us a realistic look into the human heart at the same time. The way a life, or a death, can take us over so fully. The ways a mind can change, or shatter.

Excellent hard sci-fi with heart. I was sept away.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a wonderfully compelling book that celebrates scientific exploration and discovery through the lens of the main character, June Reed. We meet her first at 12-years old when she's dealing with the death of her beloved uncle, an engineer and literal rocket scientist. She's a smart, driven student-turned-astronaut who manages better with machines than she does people, but still learns how to make friends along the way. While most of her educational and career path has been motivated by pure curiosity and a need for understanding that never runs out, June also exhibits a driving need to help others and do the right thing.

I loved the varied pacing in this book—some times you're learning how to breathe deep in an underwater training exercise and other times dealing with a frenzied and intense outer space emergency. The story is set in a not too distant future where space travel has evolved a bit beyond where we stand today—but still hasn't gone so far as to have large colonies of non-scientist humans living easily on moons or other planets.

A fascinating read!

A nice blend of sci-fi and WF, this is one to handsell to fans of Netlfix's Away and Another Life. A good purchase for collections looking to expand their sci-fi offerings.

--- Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review. My thoughts and opinions are my own ---

[2.5 Stars]

Ok, I have a lot of thoughts on this. As one of my more anticipated reads for 2021 I found this to be disappointing. Particularly because I do not feel that the book description was accurate. While yes, the description is true to what does happen in the novel, I didn't find the book's events to be as intense as described. Certainly not anywhere near The Martian by Andy Weir, which was the comparison that really drew me in initially. In fact, the book is quite slow-paced and reads with a detached quality that separates the reader from what is going down in the book.

I'm never a proponent for rating books based on what I wanted them to be, because that's simply not fair. The book is only ever going to be what it is and while I do think that a book could have done more or expanded further on what it is, it will never be something else (I know that sounded convoluted but I hope you get my gist). For this reason, I did try to approach rating this book as objective as possible and really evaluating what it actually was without my prior ideas of what I expected it to be getting in the way. Because while I'm disappointed that it was not as epic as the description sounded, that's not a book fault, it's a marketing fault.

Yet even with my objective approach, I still found this book a bit lackluster for these listed reasons:

- Inconsistent Pacing: This book had a high tendency to dawdle on daily events and then rush through pivitol plot developments. Key examples being <spoilers> Amelia's hand amputation and discovering Theresa was being held against her will </spoilers> . I feel the book really could have benefited from focusing in on some of these examples and really working through them (or even just explaining them more). Instead, a lot of these events were just introduced and resoloved in less than 10 pages which left me reeling and confused. I found myself multiple times going "Hey we should really talk about that!" to the book. I think this lead to my detached feeling from the book's events . This coupled with the fact that we had two major time jumps that left issues unresolved, the book read a little unbalanced. Like it was lurching through the summary of a more fleshed out story. Skipping stuff here or there and consolidating plot points to save pages. Definitely not the vibe I want from a book.
- Training Montages: There were at least three, maybe four, training montages that went down. Just paragraphs where her bodily tranformation was documented and we heard about how she "saw herself getting slimmer in the mirror". I don't know why but this irked me. The first one, and mayybbeee the second made sense. But all the others after that made no sense and were repetative. Considering what I said above, how other plot points could have benefited from more page time, everytime another training montage came up I just wished we had used that time instead to focus on those more intense moments. Things that actually would have added to the overall story and its intrigue.
- "Fiery Love Affair": there was none. June's affliction with James was not cute or logical. Other than the fact that they were both smart and the only two people living on this station, there didn't seem to be much that drove them together. I never once felt that their love "threaten[ed] to destroy everything they've worked so hard to create", nor that there was any "electric attraction". James was honesly a terrible person and his 'relationship' with June was forced and a bit creepy. Something about him having been a grad student who worked with her uncle when she was 12 and how now he was sleeping with her weirded me out even though they are both consenting adults. It would have made a lot more sense to me if he had been a mentor figure vs a 'lover'.
- The Ending was Disappointing: After the whole journey we just went on of following June and her efforts to convince others of Inquiry's crew still being alive, I was so frustrated with the ending. And that's where I'm gonna leave that for the sake of spoilers.

Overall, I just feel meh about it. I was disapointed in how it wasn't what I expected, and then I was let down by the execution and writing. I didn't care for the detached vibes it had, lack of quotation marks (oh ya, it has those too), the time jumps and pacing problems, or the plot development. I loved June and think that her story and what she experiences was super interesting, but the method in which it was told to me just wasn't it. Ya win some and lose some, I guess.

I'm not sure what it is about Kate Hope Day's work that doesn't jive with me; I thought this one sounded great, and found myself struggling through it. I had the same experience with her previous novel, If Then. Who knows!