A review by rosa44
Orbital by Samantha Harvey

adventurous emotional mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.75

"Chie looks hard at the photograph. They had it displayed on one of the walls at home; she remembers her mother pointing it out. Look, Chie-chan,that’s me the day the men went to the moon. Even now she doesn’t know what she sees in that Moon Landing Day on the beach; she doesn’t know what to read into the strangeness of the scene, the incongruity of image and title. She examines her mother’s face, interrogates the scowl for a clue as towhat it denotes, but she doesn’t know. Everything she reads into it is after the fact, superimposed, and a guess at the truth. Why did the photograph end up on the wall when Chie was a child? What was so particular or telling or meaningful about it? Was it a mother saying to her daughter: and now Iwill show you what’s possible in your life, the near-limitlessness of what humans, and therefore you, can do? But then why the scowl, why not an expression of possibility or hope? Or was she saying: here are some men reaching the moon – do you see or hear a single woman among them, much less a non-white, non-American woman, do you notice that this is a collection of men in the full prime of their masculinity with their rockets and thrusters and pay loads and the eyes of the world on them – this is what the world is, a playground for men, a laboratory for men, don’t compete because any attempts at competition will end in your feeling dispirited and inferior and crushed, why run a race you can never win, why set yourself upto fail – so please know, my daughter, that you are not inferior and hold that grandly in your heart and live your inconsequential life as well as you can with a dignity of being, will you do that for me?Or was she saying: look at these men going to the moon, be afraid my child at what humans can do, because we know don’t we what it all means,we know the fanfare and glory of the pioneering human spirit and we know the wonder of splitting the atom and we know what these advances can do,your grandmother knew it only too well when she stepped off the pavement to a sound she didn’t recognise and a flash that seemed both distant and so close it might have happened inside her own head, and in her bewilderment came a kernel of knowledge that this might be it, a knowledge that gave rise instantly to a vision of me, her first and only child, which was the last vision she ever experienced, so I am saying to you Chie, my first and only child, that you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory."