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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Alyson Foster grew up in Michigan and earned her B.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan, winning a Hopwood Award for her fiction. She received her M.F.A. from George Mason University, where she was a Completion Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in publications including Glimmer Train , the Iowa Review , Ascent , and the Kenyon Review . Foster lives in Washington, D.C., where she works for the National Geographic library and writes for the National Geographic News Watch blog.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Botany professor, mother, troubled wife, manic gardenerand now an astronaut? Fosters crammed debut tracks the hectic life of Jessica Frobisher, a woman encountering crises of conscience, loyalty and the heart.Narrated in emails, most of them written from Jess to Arthur Danielson, her colleague at the University of Michigan and possibly her lover, this multithemed first novel packs a heavy fuel load but never achieves escape velocity. Jess full life and fraught marriage come under additional stress following a shuttle disaster at Spaceco, the commercial space flight company where her husband, Liam, works. The explosion kills two crew members and four passengers. Is Liam implicated in a systems-failure coverup? And what about the future of Spaceco now that tycoon Robert Kahn is suing the company for the death of his daughter, one of the passengers, who was pregnant and shouldnt have been on board? Then there's the ethical issue of charging $250,000 for a flight into space to enable thrill-seeking members of the 1 percent to play astronaut for a day. Jess, meanwhile, works with endangered plants while Arthur is in Manitoba, Canada, researching global warmings effect on at-risk subarctic ecosystems. This somewhat heavy-handed mix of politics, morality and personal relationships becomes even more complicated when journalists camp out at Jess house and a filmmaker arrives with an offer that might save Spacecos finances if hes allowed to make a documentary about the events, including a space flight with Jess on board. Jess emails give voice to a smart, sardonic, abrasive, not especially likable character, but it's hard to get involved in her emotional dilemmas, perhaps because of the hobbling narrative device. Even the storys implosive conclusion has a low impact.An intelligent new voice in fiction yet not an especially persuasive one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Told through a series of e-mails, Foster's debut chronicles the aftermath of a commercial space-shuttle disaster. Botany professor Jessica Frobisher's husband, Liam, is an engineer for Spaceco, the first company to offer trips to space to regular people, albeit extremely wealthy ones. When one of the shuttles explodes immediately after its launch, the media turns a magnifying glass on Spaceco and its employees, looking to assign blame. Under scrutiny first from persistent reporters and then by a documentary filmmaker and his wife, Jessica turns to Arthur, her University of Michigan colleague who has fled to Manitoba after the end of their affair. Over e-mail, Jessica reveals the truth about Spaceco's culpability, her anger at her husband and the situation he's put their family in, and her longing for Arthur. Foster expertly builds suspense when the documentary director asks Jessica to accompany him on the first shuttle trip following the disaster. Foster's absorbing character study couched in a very contemporary cautionary tale is likely to find many fans among literary-fiction lovers.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In this fine debut, Jessica Frobisher has received a card from Arthur, a colleague in her botany department with whom she had an affair, and responds with obsessive, completely one-sided emails about her troubles: her husband's space tourism business has suffered a deadly catastrophe. VERDICT The email setup works unobtrusively to relate events, and the propulsive prose offers a fine portrait of a woman in distress but not going under. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
