From the same author as The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo comes a poetic approach of a woman’s struggle to reach the stars she loves so much while navigating family drama and coming out. I loved the fact that the book was not solely about coming out as a gay woman and the difficulty this posed while working in the military/NASA in the 80’s when the word gay carried a different type of stigma – mostly associated with unprotected sex and AIDS, but it focuses in a one-in-a-lifetime love that very few are lucky enough to find and even fewer to see through to old age.

You are here,” Antonio continued, “because NASA is about to embark on its greatest and most groundbreaking enterprise yet: the space shuttle program. Until now, space exploration has been exceptional. It has been rare. Soon it will become routine.”

From the teacher days to NASA space cadet and being a woman in a prestigious aeronautic programme, the book covers (very well I might add), what it means to be an astronaut or more specifically, a woman astronaut.

The reason for each of the cadets was different – pilot a space ship, see Earth from above, excel in the hardest field and for Joan, it was being closer to her special interest – stars.

And yet, most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them. When you gaze up at the sky and you see Antares, with its reddish hue, in the middle of the constellation Scorpius, you are looking at the same star the Babylonians cataloged as early as 1100 B.C.E.
To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

And to face gravity and the psychological toll of being above earth takes a lot of courage.

Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway

Vanessa and Joan’s romance starts off with looks shared, a mini outing in the dark of the night to look at constellations and feeling very at ease with one another. I started suspecting something was going on between these two that was more than just two girlfriends talking when Vanessa asked her for a beer date.

        “Blow off Griff and come get a beer with me.”
        “Why won’t you just join us?”
        “Because I just want to get a beer with you.”

Joan takes a while to catch on that Vanessa likes her “that” way and in the meantime wants to see if a relationship with Griff is going to go anywhere. She realizes she doesn’t like men when she tries to kiss him and nearly gags.

He gave in to her then, put his hands on the wall and pushed against her. He kissed her back.
He tasted like rum, and she wanted to gag. The roughness of his chin. The smell of him. She hated it as much as she’d known she would.
She pushed him away—she had to.

When she and Vanessa try out a date, it goes a lot smoother and the feelings come up

I want to show you every good thing I’ve ever found,” Joan said.
The way Vanessa’s eyes crinkled at the sides…Joan knew that she would not need to find a way to tell Vanessa how she felt. Vanessa would understand it. Which meant Joan would not need to learn how to be anything other than who she already was.

Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.

Besides Joan and Vanessa’s secret romance, we also follow the life of her close family, mostly of her sister’s (Beatrice) and her nieces’ (Frances) troubles. Beatrice is a serial complainer, nothing is ever good enough and even though she gets support from her parents in money and Joan is stepping up as an extra parent rather than a fun aunt, Beatrice can’t stop complaining that she’s a struggling single mother with no help. All while dating a string of men. And running off for the weekend to be with them while dumping her kid at her sister’s place with no warning and no check to see whether her sister, who has a busy schedule either way, had any time for it. Beatrice is to be pitied if anything – she wants so much to live her own life that she pushes away the one good thing she’s done with it, her child, in search of the unicorn: an eligible bachelor that’s going to take care of her so she won’t have to work anymore and that has enough money to buy anything she might want.

Listen to me, kiddo. For some people, childhood is the best part of their lives, and later, all they are trying to do is go back to it. But for people like us, it’s different. The good part hasn’t started yet. But it’s coming. It’s just ahead, when your life is in your own hands and, listen to me, you are going to soar.

And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy.

When poor Frances is sent off to boarding school and left there over the holidays, Joan steps in and convinces her sister to entrust her niece in her care while she goes off gallivanting in Europe with her husband. And Joan steps in, once more, and takes care of the one person in the world she loves above Vanessa.

“Listen, Frances Emerson Goodwin,” Joan said, holding Frances by the chin and making her look at her. “I will love you until the day I die, do you hear me? There is nothing you could do or say or think or feel that would change that. I am yours to fall back on, forever.
“You make my life worth something. And I can promise you with my entire body that you will never be alone. Every day, you can wake up and go to bed knowing there is someone whose heart is bursting, barely able to contain how much they love you. I know you’re my niece, Frances. But you have always, too, been mine.”

The extra struggle with gaining a child is that you lose your freedom and Joan is afraid her relationship with Vanessa is not sustainable. They can’t be “together”

“I can’t stand up in front of everyone we know and announce how good it feels to love you,” Vanessa said

Once she’d loved someone long enough, she’d understand that anything is possible, that she was capable of worse and greater acts than she knew.

That was sweet.

The book also starts and finishes with a bang, problems in space with the latest mission which require a crash landing in order to save the lives of Vanessa and the last remaining person alive on board, Lydia. For a while we don’t know whether Vanessa survives and Joan sees how empty and sad her life would be without her.

        How can her heart sink in microgravity? But it does

All in all, happy end. I loved the love element, the quiet gravitas of Joan, the explosive side as a military pilot for Vanessa and felt grated by Beatrice (I think this was the point). Different women want different things in life and we’re not here to judge. Some might feel that being with a man means succumbing to their wishes and whims and losing half of yourself, others feel that gaining a man means security and the loss of stress and money troubles. I think what the book got right was that, regardless of sex and gender, being with the right person can mean everything (but their loss can also take half of yourself).