Five books where women in space take center stage

Michelle Anne Schingler, a former librarian and Hebrew school teacher, is the managing editor at Foreword Reviews. At BookRiot she tagged five books about the universe and women’s roles in its mapping, including:

Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight is post-apocalyptic and engrossing. At least: we’re pretty sure that the story is post-apocalyptic. Sully and her team can’t get anyone on the comm [on their way back from a mission to Jupiter], and as they approach Earth, it appears to have gone dark. On the ground, at an Arctic research center, an older astronomer, Augustine, suspects the same; the rescue team that cleared out the rest of the base hinted as much, but Auggie stubbornly refused to move. Now he’s waiting out the end of the world with a young woman, Iris, whom the rescuers somehow forgot, and nurturing regret over the way he responded to love in his life. Somewhere in the universe he has a daughter whom he abandoned; Sully, too, knows that there’s a child out there for whom her dreams came to represent cruelty and withholding. As Sully and Auggie face everyone’s ends, they are still stuck reflecting on whether or not failing to be the perfect parent makes one a failure overall. (Conclusion: not.)

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue