Kat's Books

First one in the ‘books’ for 2018! Thanks to no plans for New Year’s Eve, I was glued to this all last night, and then finished it basically at the 24 hour mark. And it was a Christmas present from a friend! I’ve already stuck to my first book resolution: read from my huge stack of books I own!
AND it was a good one! ‘Dare Mighty Things’ is a story about a competition between a group of the brightest and bravest young people vying for a spot on a top-secret space mission funded by NASA a few decades from now, and it’s only at the very end of the book that it’s revealed what the actual mission is.

Cassandra (Cassie) Gupta isn’t your usual storybook ‘heroine’ either, and I enjoyed following her character and getting to know her; she’s 18, Indian-American, is one of the first wave of ‘designer babies’, super smart, and athletic, and ever since she can remember, her dream has been to go into space. All the way through the book, I couldn’t help but think about how I’m kind of in awe of ANYone who has that drive to go through what it takes to test for and train to go into space, because it has to be a VERY intense drive. You see this from the many characters in the book, not just Cassie. She starts to develop friends as she goes through the program, something that’s pretty new to her, as she now has found a place where she ‘fits in’. So this story has elements of not only this ‘big picture’ (in this case, a HUGE ONE, ie Space) that she is finding her place in, but one where the main character Cassie is newly discovering what it means to develop bonds with others, at the same time as pushing oneself and persevering to achieve a long-held dream. At times it’s intense, and at others, very self-reflective.
The writing in this book was never a struggle to read, even with all the quasi-tech lingo, and (author) Heather Kaczynski's love of space flight is obvious when you read this book; it’s hard not to get excited, and a bit terrified, for the mission. Now that I have read to the end and know that it’s a duology (I must read the upcoming 2nd book to know what on Earth, haha) is going to happen. There’s definitely a lot more to come!