In the Quick: A Novel by Kate Hope Day | 02 Mar 2021|Randomhouse

In the Quick is Kate Hope Day’s second novel, after If, Then, a story where folks in a rural town get flashes of alternate realities. In the Quick doesn’t follow If, Then, but it is in a slightly alternate reality.

June, orphaned and living with her brilliant inventor uncle, also has a gift for invention, the ability to look at things and imagine how they might work, or work better. After her uncle dies, and June almost burns down the house fixing a boiler, she’s sent off to the academy where astronautic engineers and astronauts are trained, though she’s only 12, a few years younger than the rest.

When the fuel cells her uncle designed for a deep space mission fail, June wants to help but her age works against her and despite her intuitive understanding of the design, and her exposure to the design process as he and his students were creating it.

It isn’t until she’s graduated and working as an engineer on a station that she realizes there’s still a chance the deep space explorers are still alive, and she gets herself assigned to an outpost where James, one of the students who worked on the cell design, is now stationed. The design failure has been eating away at him, turning him inward and morose. It’s up to June to connect with him and see if they can work together to fix the flaws and see if there is a hope that the crew can be saved.

Day has done an outstanding job of creating a vision of a space program that’s not quite ours, with details like the NAP (National Space Program) and adding a planet (The Pink Planet) to our solar system. She’s clearly done her research and though she could have fit it all in our reality, she’s chose to twist it just enough so that the story stands on its own rather than be swallowed by the real.

The feel is somewhere between The Lady Astronaut and The Queen’s Gambit, and this book should find a broad audience.