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Title: Challenger Park
Author: Stephen Harrigan
Narrator: Sam Freed
Format: Abridged
Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-01-11
Publisher: Random House Audio
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it's like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today's astronauts.
At the novel's center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. And Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.
Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son's asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant, perhaps unreachable, her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.
In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan's narrative authority brought a vanished 19th-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives, the risks, the friendships, the rituals, and the training of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting, indeed a thrilling, novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
Critic Reviews:
"A fine, absorbing achievement, probably the best science-factual novel about the space-faring worlds of Houston and Cape Canaveral in the nearly half-century since the first astronauts were chosen." (New York Times Book Review)
Members Reviews:
A Long Read
Liked the story. However, too much devoted to the internal dialogue of the characters. Too much introspection. However, learned a great deal about the workings of the shuttle program.
Five Stars
Great fictional story about a person going into outer space. Does have facts relating to this subject.
Very good book
Faithful to the realities of life in the space program; faithful to the complex human issues that challenge our lives. A very good read.
Exceptionally Good
A smart, nuanced, and emotionally powerful novel. As always, Harrigan's writing is terrific, his subtle sense of humor engaging, and the narrative compelling.
Laborious
When reading the description of this novel, I was excited to see a fictional account of an astronaut in the days of the Space Shuttle program. I'd say that about 1/3 of the novel (that may be generous) is packed with an interesting story of mission training, launch and coping with several malfunctions that change the course of the mission the main character trained for.
Unfortunately, the other 2/3 of the novel were slow moving and packed with pathos about an unhappy marriage, an affair, motherly guilt, fear about a child's health problems, several characters' life tragedies, and most tangentially, a priest's crisis of faith. It got to a point where I skimmed through Lucy's endless pearl clutching over her life and the conversations between Walt and Luis about nothing having anything to do with the rest of the story.
