IN THE QUICK

In the near-ish future, a gifted engineer dreams of repairing the flaw in the fuel cells designed by her uncle that doomed a long-distance space mission.

Her uncle has recently died when narrator June is sent to the school named for him on the National Space Program campus. She’s only 12, but she has learned from her famous uncle to always ask of a piece of machinery, “What does it do?” This phrase echoes throughout the text as June trains for work in space; Day does a terrific job of making an engineer’s thought process as exciting as a thriller’s chase scenes. June and her classmates are obsessed with Inquiry, the first-ever craft using the fuel cells invented by her uncle with a team of his students, which has lost propulsion control while orbiting Saturn. Some of them helped design the fuel cells, others have friends or lovers on the crew, so all are devastated when NSP cancels a planned rescue mission in Endurance, a craft powered by the same suspect cells. The novel blends fraught personal relationships with intricate engineering as the narrative moves forward six years, when June is sent to the Pink Planet to work with James, one of her uncle’s students, whose debates with his lover, Theresa, about the fuel cell design forecast similar conflict between him and June while they work on repairing the cells’ flaw. Nonetheless, they become intimate—until she uncovers a grim secret that ruptures their partnership. June flees the station into the Pink Planet’s unforgiving atmosphere, nearly dying in a harrowing scene that again displays Day’s gift for gripping suspense that unfolds largely in the narrator’s head. Regrettably, the author is not as skilled at gathering together her plot strands, and an abrupt ending leaves many unanswered questions about the characters she has somewhat elliptically developed.

An interesting idea that doesn’t quite gel.