The Calculating Stars

I spent a lot of this year reading non-fiction and historical fiction about women in WWI and WWII, resulting in a ridiculous amount of knowledge about the WASPs (and WAVEs and computers in Bletchley and...) So I was very into the concept of alt-fiction NACA recruiting WASPs as astronauts. The climate-based apocalypse hit quite close to home. I think one strength was how Kowal captures a lot of the energy at the time: focused, goal-directed, but still heavily hierarchical and sexist and really portrays a time in the US para-military well. I liked the exploration about how sexism affected white women and women of color differently. Kowal also had very good consultants for the meteorology and astrophysics. Unfortunately, the pacing was a bit off: the first third is compelling and fast, and the back two thirds definitely drags through the same problems, introducing more and more characters