God is an Astronaut
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The day of the accident, Jess is in the backyard with a chainsaw, clearing space to build the greenhouse she's always wanted. And, as always, she is thinking of Arthur. Arthur, her colleague in the botany department, who never believed she'd actually start the project. Arthur, who, after getting too close, has cut off contact, escaping to study the subarctic pines.
But now there has been a disaster, connected to her husband's space tourism company: the explosion of a space shuttle filled with commercial passengers, igniting a media frenzy on her family's doorstep. Jess's engineer husband is implicated, and she knows there is information he's withholding, even as she becomes an unwitting player in the efforts to salvage the company's reputation.
Struggling, Jess writes to the only person she can be candid with. She writes to Arthur. And in her e-mails -- warm, frank, yet freighted with regret and the old habits of seduction -- Jess tries to untangle how her life has changed, in one instant but also slowly, and how it might change still.
With sure pacing and intimate wisdom, God is an Astronaut unfurls a story of secrets and of wonderment, the unforgettable and the vast unknowable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Foster's choice to present her debut novel as a series of emails is a curious one, especially given the intriguing material. Spaceco is a for-profit space tourism business that offers $250,000 tickets to orbit Earth in a rocket ship. One of the company's spacecraft recently exploded at liftoff, killing two crew members and four paying passengers. Liam, a Spaceco employee who becomes the public face of the company following the disaster, will do anything in his power to keep the company from falling apart though he seems unable to simultaneously keep his marriage together. The story is told via emails from his wife, Jess (a tenured science professor), to Arthur, her former lover. The emails help Jess process her emotions, as she is bombarded by journalists' requests for interviews about the accident but advised by her lawyers to keep silent. Unfortunately, the format is distracting especially because Jess recreates entire scenes, with dialogue, in her emails to her ex-beau, including extensive blow-by-blow accounts of arguments and conversations she has with her husband. While the plot is smart and raises sharp questions about the dubious ethics of extreme tourism, the epistolary form prevents the reader from becoming completely immersed in the story.
