Review: In The Quick by Kate Hope Day

In The Quick by Kate Hope Day

Blurb from Goodreads:

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.

“An enthralling, romantic, and powerful testament to human strength and frailty, and the pursuit of possibility.”—Courtney Summers, New York Times bestselling author of Sadie

June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention who leaves home to begin grueling astronaut training at the National Space Program. Younger by two years than her classmates at Peter Reed, the school on campus named for her uncle, she flourishes in her classes but struggles to make friends and find true intellectual peers. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station—and a hard-won sense of belonging—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 seems to have forgotten the crew, June alone has evidence that makes her believe they are still alive.

She seeks out James, her uncle’s former protégé, 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.

Both a gripping narrative of one woman’s persistence and a 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.

My Review:
Wow, this book is stunning!  I truly could barely put it down from the first chapter until I finished it.  The description of being in space -- the physicality of it -- were just described in such a visceral way.  And I liked being in June's mind, understanding how she problem solved -- it was so foreign but compelling.  If you liked The Martian or The Queen's Gambit, I found this to be a bit of a mix of the two.  Not that there was any chess involved but the way a young girl thought in a way that blew everyone out of the water against the odds.

In The Quick came out earlier this month on March 2, 2021, you can purchase HERE!  I really loved this one and definitely recommend it -- I am still thinking about it!

Space is cruel to the human body. We aren't machines, rockets with metal skin and polymer bones, rovers with microchips for guts. Our bodies are full of fluid and soft tissue. We aren't built for space. Our thoughts, the things we know, are sturdier in zero gravity, but they originate in gray matter. They change shape, even disappear in the face of disorientation, dehydration, oxygen deprivation. Because ideas require bodies too, hands, lips, a tongue, ears. Otherwise they're about as useful as dust motes drifting in the air.