Reid set out to write a love story, and it’s rather adorable. I’m struck that a Lesbian love story set in a time I remember can seem sweetly nostalgic, but here we are. Not everything about our time is awful.

Reid missed that, in searching for colorful background, she also committed herself to writing a School Story, or possibly a Boot Camp Story. Joan and Vanessa are Astronaut Candidates in the early 1980s. It doesn’t really seem like the 1980s: the book unfolds a dozen years after Stonewall, but it never seems to have occurred to Asst. Prof. Joan Goodwin that she might be gay. Allison Bechdel figured in out when she went to college (in 1979); Joan is about a decade older and has a PhD, but then again she’s a Texan. The obligatory training scenes are sometimes good and sometimes feel tacked together.

This is also a Flight Story, and this is a missed opportunity. Reid isn’t that interested in astronomy (Joan’s field) or flying (Vanessa’s passion), and has a better idea of how she might pitch astronomy to her readers than piloting. That’s a shame because, from a very early stage in the first chapter, the reader knows precisely where this is heading: Vanessa Ford is going to get her dream of piloting a space shuttle and be taught to be careful what you wish for.

Despite all this, I quite liked this book.