In the Quick
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A young, ambitious female astronaut's life is upended by a fiery love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew in this brilliantly imagined novel in the tradition of Station Eleven and The Martian.
'Feminist and thrilling. I highly recommend this novel' ANN NAPOLITANO, author of Dear Edward
'Enthralling' COURTNEY SUMMERS, author of Sadie
June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention, who leaves home to begin a grueling astronaut training program. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station, but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle's fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was twelve years old, and while the rest of the world has forgotten them, June alone has evidence that makes her believe the crew is still alive.
She seeks out James, her uncle's former protégée, also brilliant, also difficult, who has been trying to discover why Inquiry's fuel cells failed. James and June forge an intense intellectual bond that becomes an electric attraction. But the love that develops between them as they work to solve the fuel cell's fatal flaw threatens to destroy everything they've worked so hard to create--and any chance of bringing the Inquiry crew home alive.
Equal parts gripping narrative of scientific discovery and charged love story, In the Quick is an exploration of the strengths and limits of human ability in the face of hardship and the costs of human ingenuity. At its beating heart are June and James, whose love for each other is eclipsed only by their drive to conquer the challenges of space travel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Day's uneven latest (after If, Then), a precocious girl grows up to be an astronaut in a near future of expanded space exploration. June Reed, 12, lives with her aunt Regina, who raised her along with June's late uncle Peter, a brilliant engineer for the National Space Program. Shortly before Peter died, he developed a fuel cell for Inquiry, a spacecraft that lost power as it was beginning its orbit around Saturn. After June hears that the blame is being put on a fuel cell malfunction, she becomes obsessed with fixing the design flaw and rescuing the four astronauts aboard the craft, and Regina sends the mischievous June away to boarding school to prep for astronaut training. Despite being younger than her peers, June's tenacity earns her a spot on a space station, where she and her uncle's protégé fix the faulty cell to power a rescue shuttle. While Day does a decent job developing June as a curious girl who claims to be "better with machines than with people," the haphazard plot feels rushed and the prose can be clunky ("My eyelids were like lead. They lowered. They lowered. They lowered again"). This is primed for launch, but it doesn't really take off.