The Great Good Summer: 10/01/17

The Great Good Summer by Liz Garton Scanlon is a contemporary novel set when the last space shuttle was flown across the country on the back of a 747 for one last hurrah.

Ivy and her best friend Paul meanwhile are trying to get to Florida to find her mother. She has run off with a traveling shyster named Hallelujah Dave. So they buy a bus ticket and head east.

It's a reverse road trip fueled by faith, poor parenting, and poor decision making. Maybe because I've never lived near a bus terminal, I find these running away by bus plots difficult to believe, especially for protagonists that are barely teenagers. Growing up in the suburbs, it would have taken me an hour (by express) or two hours by regular city bus to get to the Greyhound terminal.

Here's a book that takes a change, a point of evolution, if you will, in NASA's approach to space science, and pits it against blind, stupefying faith in sort of cage match. I'm not sure there's a clear winner in this book. For a better examination of faith, femininism and science, within the same setting, I recommend The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly.

Two stars

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