Interesting Facts about Space

November 6, 2023
The offbeat and delightful latest from Austin (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead) plunges readers into the quirky and turbulent inner life of Enid, an employee at a NASA-like agency. The episodic narrative follows Enid, who is gay, through her daily routine as she reckons with her painful past. She bakes a gender reveal cake for her pregnant half-sister Edna, despite finding the practice “profoundly offensive”; obsessively streams true crime podcasts; worries a mysterious bald man is stalking her (she also has an unexplained fear of bald men); and dates a poly couple. Eventually, she cautiously enters her first serious relationship with Polly, the ex-wife of another woman she’d briefly dated, and begins to confront agonizing memories of her late father, who left her mother for another woman. Enid’s preoccupation with random facts about space frequently appears in interactions with her mother (“Did you know astronomers found a planet without a star?” she asks her mother at the beginning of a phone call). Eventually, realizing she ought to deal with her phobia of bald men and her troubling memories, Enid begins seeing a therapist. The adventure inside her mind is engrossing, funny, and full of depth. Readers will fall for this unusual and lovable protagonist.

November 15, 2023
A 26-year-old woman works to better understand how her past is affecting her present relationships. Enid, an information architect at the Space Agency and a true-crime aficionado, is caught in a complicated behavioral pattern of her own making, she thinks. Her father left her mother when she was young to start another family, destroying her mother emotionally in the process. Her half sisters, Edna and Kira, have recently welcomed her into their lives. But Enid is convinced that there's something wrong with her, despite having a good job, a good life, and being a caring daughter to her mother (who suffers from severe bouts of depression). She has a phobia about bald men, cleans obsessively, and dates continually yet refuses to stay with anyone longer than a month or two; she's also unhappy with her proclivity to take the easiest route and lean into expected behavior rather than doing what she believes is best. Case in point: Though she's a lesbian who has a complicated relationship with her gender identity, when her half sister asks her to bake a cake for her sister's gender reveal party, she immediately says yes and then berates herself for not standing up for what she believes in. The novel follows Enid as she seeks to better understand her worsening phobias and the way they've started to negatively affect her job and life. She starts therapy, begins to let people see the real her, and works to unpick the knots in her memory that are compromising her ability to live her life. Enid is introspective without being irritating. A complicated, layered exploration of how bullying, fear, and a desperate desire to fit in have lasting effects.

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December 1, 2023
Relationships have never been easy for Enid. She doesn't fit in with her more traditional half sisters, and building a friendship with them after their father's death seems impossible. Instead of talking about feelings with her mother, who struggles with mental health, Enid tells her everything she knows about space. She online dates, with women casually and consistently passing through her door, none of them staying. Enid loves true-crime podcasts, sometimes uses her partial deafness to avoid responding to people, and has an irrational fear of bald men. When Enid finds herself in an actual relationship, her casually detached lifestyle becomes challenged, and her fear of bald men worsens when she believes one is stalking her. All the while, she avoids looking inward and facing the deeper struggles she can't ignore forever. Austin's (Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, 2022) vignette writing style perfectly captures Enid's anxious overthinking in an emotionally relatable way. The novel is quirky, funny, and heartfelt as Enid explores the effects of fear and how vulnerability truly helps us connect to others.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 15, 2023

Following her best seller Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, Austin's latest novel introduces Enid, a hard-of-hearing lesbian who communicates her feelings largely via texts about space to her mother, self-soothes with a true-crime podcast addiction, and nurtures a phobia of bald men that threatens to upend her daily existence. Enid works at a space agency, though she's quick to point out that she's neither an astronaut nor an engineer but an information architect. She's painfully trying to forge relationships with her half-sisters after the death of their father, who was part of their lives but not hers. Her life is compartmentalized until it isn't, and Enid must face the discomfort she's been suppressing for years. Written with an even balance of care, humor, and insight, Enid is a multifaceted protagonist readers can relate to, feel for, and empathize with as she first maintains her mother's well-being, then realizes she must tend to her own. VERDICT This is a sweet love letter to the awkward, the unseen, the cyberbullied, and everyone struggling to understand their place in the world. Austin is certainly finding hers, and fans will flock.--Julie Kane

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