by Loren Gush
Read by Inés del Castillo
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Content: There is some swearing, including a couple of f-bombs. It’s in the History section of the bookstore.

In the late 1970s, NASA changed its policy about including women in the corps; realizing (albeit slowly) that perhaps space travel shouldn’t be an all-boys club. In 1978 they accepted the first six women into the space program: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.

If you’re like me, you’ve heard of Sally Ride, the first woman in space, but the rest were relative unknowns. Grush weaves the stories of the six women together – a brief biography of their younger years, but mostly concerning their desires to go into space, and then their later experiences at NASA and eventually flying on the shuttles – seamlessly. The book has enough personal information to make the women feel like real people, not just Trailblazers and Pioneers and all that important stuff (which they were, don’t get me wrong). There was enough technical NASA stuff in the book to make it feel authentic without intimidating someone (like me) who is not STEM-inclined. And there was enough feminist stuff to make the reader realize what these six women were up against and how much they had to push to get the culture around NASA to change.

And del Castillo was a fabulous reader. She kept me engaged in the material and I swear she choked up a bit around the Challenger explosion in 1986. (Yes, that’s in there.) It’s not something I would have normally picked up, but I’m so glad I did.