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.

August 1, 2024

When her phobias threaten to derail her life, 26-year-old Enid, an information architect at the NASA-like Space Agency, cautiously reassesses her traumatic past. Enid, who is neurodivergent and partially deaf, lives a life marked by denial and avoidance. After her father's death, she awkwardly connects with her bubbly half-sisters, hooks up with women but steers clear of long-term relationship commitments, and shares interesting facts about space with her mother instead of addressing her mother's deep-seated depression. When her fear of bald men leads to trouble at work and in her personal life, Enid finally seeks help. Narrator Natalie Naudus crafts a compassionate, deeply affecting portrayal of Enid, tenderly capturing her abiding concern for her mother and the arc of her anxiety, which grows from a dull itch to a fever pitch. Naudus also offers sensitive depictions of secondary characters, including Enid's refreshingly straightforward new lover Polly and her mother, who radiates warmth even when she is overwhelmed by depression. VERDICT Austin's (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead) layered novel reveals resilience in the face of trauma and the possibility of connecting with others while coming to terms with one's own differences.--Sarah Hashimoto

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.