The Time It Takes to Fall by Margaret Lazarus Dean

The Time It Takes to Fall by Margaret Lazarus Dean

It is the early 1980s, and America is in love with space. Growing up in the shadow of Cape Canaveral, young Dolores Gray has it particularly bad: she dreams of becoming an astronaut.

At school, Dolores finds herself caught between her desire for popularity and her secret friendship with the smartest and most unpopular boy in her class, whose father is NASA's Director of Launch Safety. At home, discord begins to grow between her parents when her father's job as a NASA technician is threatened.

Looking for escape, Dolores loses herself in her scrapbook, where she files away newspaper articles about the astronauts and the shuttles, weather reports on launch scrubs, and stories about her idol, Judith Resnik.

Then, on the morning of January 28, 1986, seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing all seven astronauts on board -- including Judith Resnik. It is a moment that shakes America to its core, and nowhere is it more deeply felt than in central Florida. Dolores becomes determined to reconstruct what went wrong, both in her parent's marriage and at NASA, in the hope that she can save her father's job and keep her family together.

The Time It Takes to Fall is a coming-of-age novel that deftly weaves the story of one family's drama into the larger picture of a touchstone event in American history. It is at once an intimate look at a young girl's loss of innocence and a portrait of America's loss of innocence -- the end of an era that romanticized manned space flight and would never be the same again.

The Time It Takes to Fall is written by Margaret Lazarus Dean. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee and has received scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is a Knoxville resident.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780743297233
ISBN 10	0743297237
Title	The Time It Takes to Fall
Author	Margaret Lazarus Dean
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2008-02-01
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.