Meags's Reviews > The Calculating Stars

3 Stars

The Calculating Stars is a sci-fi story, with strong female empowerment themes, following an alternate history of the 1950s, where an extinction level event occurs, forcing the world’s brightest and boldest to join the space program a whole decade early, as human-kinds only chance of long-term survival.

This story started out STRONG. I was completely riveted on page one, completely sold on the unique premise and the promise of an exciting story to unfold. I loved how the narrative dove immediately into the action, following lady pilot (in alternate WW2), physicist and mathematician Elma York, and her rocket scientist husband Nathaniel, who barely survive a too-close-for-comfort meteor strike, which wipes out the majority of the East Coast of the USA, as they realise, in the aftermath, that planet Earth will eventually be uninhabitable for future generations, if something major isn’t done, and quickly.

And, so, the space race begins earlier than reality, this time with a female-driven component, surrounding Elma and her fellow lady scientists and WW2 pilots, who demand a seat at the big boys table and the chance to prove themselves equally capable as astronauts.

As I said, this started out strong, promising big themes and big ideas for a story that had a hell of a lot of potential. Unfortunately, though, the excitement I had, began to taper off around the 30% mark, when I realised I didn’t really like any of the characters, particularly Elma, who was, on paper, a fantastically drawn female character, who, I felt, happened to fall majorly flat in her on-page execution. I appreciated her smarts, her ambitions, and her capabilities, but—and I’m not sure if the audiobook had an effect on this—but, I found her to be extremely whiny and too delicate for the situations at hand, which had a major impact on my experience of the story going forward.

I think my biggest qualms had a lot to do with Elma’s life-impacting anxiety issues and how they presented in the story. As someone with a lifetime of anxiety issues myself, I thought I’d really appreciate this representation and perhaps see my experiences/feelings reflected in such. But alas, I found Elma’s thought patterns to be overly repetitive and her push-over behaviour too frequent and frustrating for me to read about, perhaps made worse by the societal norms and inequality of the times being reflected, and all the misogyny that came with that (that also drove me nuts, quite in the same fashion as these themes drove me nuts when I read Lessons in Chemistry).

I wouldn’t say I hated Elma, far from it, but I certainly didn’t enjoy reading her perspective and constantly feeling like I wanted to shake her or roll my eyes at her reactions or choices. And, obviously, this made me feel like crap, because I want to be the kind of woman who can fist pump the air in mad respect for female-driven story concepts like this, as well as flawed and complex lead characters like Elma, but honestly, I just read for mood and enjoyment these days and this character and her story mostly left me annoyed and wanting.

I guess my biggest complaint is simply that this story started out really engaging and exciting, but then felt like it began meandering a quarter way through, fairly uneventful, for the most part, all the way to the end. It was like two stories in that sense. The story I started reading was fantastic, but the larger arc I got at the end will probably be unmemorable to future me. I see that there are sequels, but honestly, I’m not that inspired to read on, having had quite enough of being in Elma’s headspace to last me a lifetime.

Still, an impressive concept and overall, quite a nice flow to the writing quality, but, lord, I wish I’d loved these characters more (or at all) because simply loving the characters could have sustained me through the slower moments of the story.

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Audio Edition:

The audiobook was narrated by the author, which means the characters were performed and reflected in EXACTLY the way the author indeed them to be experienced. This was pretty cool, and Kowal definitely delivered on creating the atmosphere and people of the times at hand. But... there’s always a but… I also think I was affected by the way Elma was vocalised, in a way that made her sound more precious and whinier than the character was maybe intended to be. At least that was my experience of it. Bear in mind, though, that I’m a very picky listener and the way a narrator voices a character can make or break a character for me, even if my experience may have been different in the physical reading of a story.