December 1, 2018
In 1986 Florida, young Nedda dreams of sailing the heavens but must contend with a grief-stricken father and his outré experiments. All of which matters when she really does make it as an astronaut. Following the debut novel The Book of Speculation, the recipient of BuzzFeed and Discover honors.
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Starred review from March 1, 2019
Love and loss compel a brilliant scientist to defy the laws of physics.It's 1986, and Nedda Papas--a precocious 11-year-old who dreams of becoming an astronaut--sits in an Easter, Florida, classroom, watching the Challenger launch on television. Across town, Nedda's father, Theo, tinkers with Crucible, a machine designed to manipulate time by controlling entropy. The technology has numerous practical applications, which is how the former NASA physicist-turned-college professor secured funding for his research, but in truth, the long-ago death of his infant son has Theo desperate to prolong Nedda's childhood. Cape Canaveral is just 10 miles away, so when Challenger explodes, it sends shockwaves both literal and figurative through Easter. As Nedda grapples with the crew members' demises, a catastrophic reaction sparks in Crucible's core, immobilizing Theo and leaving Easter's fate in the hands of Nedda and her mother, Betheen--a baker who, unbeknownst to Nedda, forsook a career in chemistry for her family. Swyler (The Book of Speculation, 2015) intersperses this storyline with scenes from Nedda's future aboard the Chawla, a four-person interstellar vessel en route to a faraway planet when its life-support generator begins to fail. Keenly wrought characters and evocative prose complement a multifaceted plot that explores topics ranging from relativity and thermodynamics to parent-child relationships and the afterlife. Though Theo's grief and ambition serve as a catalyst, it's Nedda's and Betheen's passion, determination, and fortitude that drive the book to its heart-wrenching, awe-inspiring conclusion.Grand in scope and graceful in execution, Swyler's latest is at once a wistfully nostalgic coming-of-age tale and a profound work of horror-tinged science fiction.
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Starred review from March 15, 2019
Swyler follows The Book of Speculation (2015) with an introspective, thrilling yarn that centers around Nedda Papas, both as an 11-year-old in 1986 in the days following the Challenger tragedy and as an adult astronaut on a mission to colonize a distant planet. Growing up in Easter, Florida, Nedda was inspired by her father, Theo, a scientist who used to work for NASA, as well as Judy Resnik, one of the brave astronauts who lost her life in the Challenger explosion. Propelled by a more personal loss?the death of Nedda's brother, Michael, a mere hour after his birth?Theo has been working on a machine he's dubbed the Crucible, which he hopes to use to extend Nedda's childhood. But when Theo activates the machine, things go terribly, terribly wrong, jeopardizing the life of Nedda's only friend, Denny, and the future of the town of Easter. Swyler uses this inventive premise of a failed attempt to control the flow of time to limn the depths of grief and love in a strikingly fresh way that resonates long after the final page has been turned. This tale's originality brings to mind the quintessential pioneering writer who used science to explore the human condition, Mary Shelley.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)