jvan 's review for:

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

3.0

---

Entertaining and made to be adapted into a TV show, this is a bouncy read but didn't ever quite captivate me. The writing is good and the story is fine but for me there was the glaring issue of a lack of aftermath from the Meteor: while there was talk about the loss of life and so on, this was an instance where several million people died and a chunk of the United States was rendered uninhabited in a minute, and it's not really dealt with. And then they talk about the first winter having temperatures vastly below normal, and that should have resulted in millions of more deaths, tens of millions probably, but again, that's not really touched on; we skip ahead a few years to the trailing end of the bitter winters. I know getting to space was the focus, and getting a woman into space the narrative, but the background material--the worldbuilding--didn't manifest enough for me and I felt let down because of it. Still a good book, just not a great one for me.