Name: The Fated Sky
ISBN: 9780765398949

Mary Robinette Kowal

The Fated Sky

Darice de Cuba

Where book one was mostly "wow". Book two was "angsty" the moment the mission to Mars started. I had trouble getting started with the book but 100 pages in it picked up in action that keeps you reading till the end.

(view spoiler)[
I was baffled about the E.coli contamination in one of the ships. I know they keep the crew in isolation before launch to avoid them taking germs, bacterias or viruses with them. But rice left out and de-oxygenized kills. Hindsight is 20/20, rice is not suitable for space travel. It didn't occur to me they could get sick with something so "common" and what a disaster it is in a spaceship. 
The second death gutted me. Even tho the book is science fiction. The way the story is, starting from 1950 makes it very believable. You can relate more easily to these characters than for example characters from "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" (also a very good book).  (hide spoiler)]

I wouldn't mind a third book with a time jump to find out how Elma and Nathaniel's life turned out on the Mars colony and what became of Earth with the worsening climate.

Ryan LaFerney

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal is the second book in the Lady Astronaut series and it manages to be an even better story than its predecessor. I thought Calculating Stars was a really fascinating alternative history of space flight which I loved. I found it to be a fun and relevant book. The Fated Sky might be an even better read. There is more action, more adversity, more emotion (there are a few devastating moments in this book). The stakes here feel a bit higher and I therefore found it more powerfully written. I think it has to do with the story-line.

Our heroine Elma York gets put on the crew for the first mission to Mars working again with Stetson Parker (a man she hates). The main crux of the novel is about how not only Elma and Parker must find ways to get along on a multiple year long mission to Mars but how the rest of the crew (which is highly diverse) must overcome adversity and the assumptions of that Parker and Elma often place upon them. The tension of being stuck on a space ship with a diverse array of individuals and someone like Parker (who very much embodies the sexist, racist Mad Men 1960s trope) makes from some fascinating character interactions. Additionally, there are riveting technical scenes of operations aboard the space shuttle gone awry. Some of these descriptions are just as riveting as the technical aspects of an Andy Weir or alastair reynolds novel. Elma York continues to be a charming, smart, woman who we willingly cheer on as her and her crew near Mars. 

This really was a great continuation of the story started in The Calculating Stars. I look forward to reading The Restless Moon soon.