This is a beautifully-written reflection on her childhood, with its traumas and triumphs, and that may make the trauma easier to handle than books with people tangling with it with the full force of adult reckoning. You have to supply some of your own understanding. Ultimately, I think that itself might be a bit of a miss for me. As she is an adult reflecting back on these years, I'd have liked to see some more deconstruction of them and how they shaped her, but I understand why she didn't- aside from the inherent pain and vulnerability in doing that, and for an audience, it also would have hamstrung the flow of her story. As it is, a very readable narrative. CW for CSA, but an excellent introduction to Blackness, womanhood, and their mingled trials through a personal experience. Would recommend to anyone wanting to learn, or to anyone needing the comfort of shared experience.

Yeah, I can't do this. On to better stories. This book reminds me why I don't consider myself as liking science fiction, and offers the encouragement that it might not just be me! I did not care about Grace as a person. Between that, the painfully-bland prose, and the sheer length of this book (with all the flashbacks to pad it out), it has been nothing but a slog. I read an entire other book with even slower prose in the time I spent avoiding this.

If you want the power of a contentedly self-absorbed white man vs. cosmic peril, If you want a story where the strength of gravity is given immensely more concern and backstory than... every nation on Earth instantly dropping everything- economics, national security, political infighting- to Trust Scientists to solve an eventual planetary death, If that world-saving science power transfer will give you a vicarious little thrill every time there's another whimsical military kidnapping of our hero, If you hate descriptions and want as little imagery and description as possible between you and Grace Doing Things, regardless of how otherworldly the setting is, If scientists being scientific only when they feel like it makes a narrative feel more human to you instead of needlessly stupid, If you also only like physics and find other areas of science boring and unworthy of even basic fact-checking, You'll enjoy this, and probably "hard" or "classic" science fiction in general! Unfortunately, I find all of these more irritating than simply staring at a wall or listening to strangers' conversations!

(My impression is that none of these are why people love this story. Unfortunately, I wanted to DNF this like sixty pages ago and cannot force through any more. I would not care about the heartwarming story even if it started on the very next page, since I neither care about Grace nor, at this point, solving the plot. 🤷‍♀️)