The Astronaut Wives Club

Ah yes, summer....it's the time of the year when we can all toss out a beach chair and grab some good and fluffy beach reading.  Well, I have never been much for the typical beach read.  Every Nicholas Sparks book I have ever read makes me skip to the end to see who dies and from what awful illness or tragedy, and honestly, I'm still trying to forget the horror of reading Twilight several summers back.  Sorry Twihards.    Regardless, every summer, I am on the hunt for that book I can simply not put down and be sort of sad when it is over.

Recently, I was in the bookstore, yes, those DO still exist, and came upon an interesting title.  Actually, I was more drawn to the retro looking book cover, so whoever designed that......good work.  The Astronaut Wives Club written by Lily Koppel is sort of the opposite of The Right Stuff and tells the stories of the women who braved their astronaut husbands going off to space during that epic time of early exploration and discovery.

The result is often enthralling and frustrating.  The subject matter is absolutely fascinating and it is remarkable how these women were able to lean on each other through such periods of uncertainty.  These women were hounded by the press, but had to keep putting on that happy housewife demeanor even if an overzealous reporter just walked into the home uninvited.  It was also surprising to learn of the rivalries that developed between the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo wives.  A little "Mean Girls" thrown into the mix was unexpected.

Koppel moves along at a leisurely pace which does make this a good beach read.  My one real complaint and what I found frustrating was that Koppel simply tries to cover too much ground and inundates the reader with wife after wife.  I was often going back to make sure just exactly which one she was talking about and often Googling their husbands names to make the references stand out more.  Just when you get really absorbed with one story, another one begins.  One portion of the book I was looking forward to was about Marilyn Lovell and Apollo 13, but Koppel boils it all down to just a couple of pages.  I could easily imagined The Astronaut Wives Club to have been a trilogy of books, each one focusing on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.  It's easy to see why Koppel chose to pack it all in one book though.

In the end, The Astronaut Wives Club is a decent read, but definitely not the page turner I was hoping for.  It is a slice of American history that has needed to be told.  Unfortunately, this effort reads more like a series of short stories.  Interesting information?  Yes, absolutely, but told in a way that left me wanting more.