I want to start this off by saying my blog is not a book review site. While I will occasionally pop on here and yammer about a book I really enjoyed I will not be posting reviews of every book I read and quite unlike with my film reviews I will not come here with a critical take on a novel. The reason is quite simple, I believe that if you are posting honest book reviews then it hampers any working relationship you may have with editors and publishers for your own material. This is a small industry and there are plenty of site and places to get the full spectrum of reviews so for me this will be only about those few books that really hit it off with me.

Certainly one of those is The Calculating Starsby Mary Robinette Kowal. Set in an alternate 1950’s timeline, the novel is about the desperate bid to get humanity into the space and colonizing Mars when Earth’s near term habitability is destroyed by an asteroid strike into the Atlantic Ocean that wipes out the Eastern Seaboard and kick starts a runaway greenhouse effect. The story follows Elma York from her survival of the initial strike, helping establish the accelerated colony program, and her quest to become an astronaut, a daunting challenge for a woman in 1950’s America,

Ms. Kowal has a deft prose style that allows for fast action, large stakes, but without sacrificing deep character and meaningful relationships. Given the setting and the central drive of the character the novel explores the nature of various forms of bias in American culture both in the 1950s and sadly quite still with us today. The exploration of that bias never, for me, crosses the line into peachiness or lecturing and Ms. Kowal gives her protagonists the freedom to have their own biases, which are challenged over the course of the character’s growth.

Ms. Kowal also co-hosts a writing podcast Writing Excusesand it was listening to her theories and practices on the craft of writing that prompted me to give her novel a try.

The Calculating Starsis a prequel to the author’s previous works but it was the first prose fiction I have read by Ms. Kowal. That said the piece stands firmly and quit ably on its own and I feel no one need have read anything else to come into the book. The sequel, The Fated Skyis already out and will soon be joining my library.