The Literate Kitty

It’s hard to imagine someone who hasn’t wanted—at some point in their lives—to be an astronaut.   Scratch that. Assuming more people are kinda like me— "science is neat (but I don't REALLY understand it" —and less like actual astronauts— aaaaall about the science stuff —then it's probably better to say a lot of us have dreamed of going out into space . (As a passenger. A salesperson. The ship’s cook. Whatever.) The thing is, we know it’s just a fantasy; in our lifetimes, the tiniest fraction of humanity will venture out into space (whether on a vessel created by NASA and/or its worldwide counterparts, or on something kooky that the SpaceX team is frantically working on).  But what if—by the strangest sequence of events—you (science-y or not) found yourself on a mission to a distant, essentially-uncharted corner of the universe… one member of a tiny three-person team aboard a cramped little spaceship, and when you woke up, from an induced travel sleep? You discov...

Look, we’ve all been there. Something major— life-shifting, even (a breakup or divorce, a death, losing a job, etc.)—suddenly happens, out of the blue, and just like that we’re smack-dab-in-the-middle of a fight-or-flight response… and we choose flight.   [If you haven’t ever been there, consider yourself lucky. Or not. I mean, how do you ever grow, or really find out what you’re made of— underneath that carefully-managed facade you show to the world —unless you experience some sort of monumental shift (which is usually some sort of trauma)?] Author Melissa Larsen takes her protagonist on just such a journey in Shutter .  __________ Betty Roux is that timeless, could-hail-from-anywhere kind of young woman: somewhere in her early 20s, still trying to find herself, and her response to her father’s suicide? Unceremoniously dumping her longish-term boyfriend, then spontaneously catching a flight from northern California to New York City (a place she’s never been), to… well...