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Challenger Park
From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo , a novel of extraordinary power about what it’s like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today’s astronauts.
At the novel’s center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.
Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son’s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.
In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan’s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
At the novel’s center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.
Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son’s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.
In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan’s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
6 people are currently reading
145 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Harrigan
28 books195 followersStephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi.
He is a longtime writer for Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. His film column for Texas Monthly was a finalist for the 2015 National Magazine Awards.
Harrigan is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for Best Novel of the West.Remember Ben Clayton was published by Knopf in 2011 and praised by Booklist as a "stunning work of art" and by The Wall Street Journal as a "a poignantly human monument to our history." Remember Ben Clayton also won a Spur Award, as well as the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, given by the Society of American Historians for the best work of historical fiction. In the Spring of 2013, the University of Texas Press published a career-spanning volume of his essays, The Eye of the Mammoth, which reviewers called “masterful” (from a starred review in Publishers Weekly), “enchanting and irresistible” (the Dallas Morning News) and written with “acuity and matchless prose.”(Booklist). His latest novel is A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.
Among the many movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO’s award-winning The Last of His Tribe, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and King of Texas, a western retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear for TNT, which starred Patrick Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, and Roy Scheider. His most recent television production was The Colt, an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For his screenplay of The Colt, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the Humanitas Prize. Young Caesar, a feature adaptation of Conn Iggulden’s Emperor novels, which he co-wrote with William Broyles, Jr., is currently in development with Exclusive Media.
A 1971 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at UT’s James A. Michener Center for Writers and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. He is also a founding member of CAST (Capital Area Statues, Inc.) an organization in Austin that commissions monumental works of art as gifts to the city. He is the recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s Texas Writers Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was recently inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Stephen Harrigan and his wife Sue Ellen have three daughters and four grandchildren.
Harrigan is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and received a number of awards, including the TCU Texas Book Award, the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and the Spur Award for Best Novel of the West.Remember Ben Clayton was published by Knopf in 2011 and praised by Booklist as a "stunning work of art" and by The Wall Street Journal as a "a poignantly human monument to our history." Remember Ben Clayton also won a Spur Award, as well as the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, given by the Society of American Historians for the best work of historical fiction. In the Spring of 2013, the University of Texas Press published a career-spanning volume of his essays, The Eye of the Mammoth, which reviewers called “masterful” (from a starred review in Publishers Weekly), “enchanting and irresistible” (the Dallas Morning News) and written with “acuity and matchless prose.”(Booklist). His latest novel is A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.
Among the many movies Harrigan has written for television are HBO’s award-winning The Last of His Tribe, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene, and King of Texas, a western retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear for TNT, which starred Patrick Stewart, Marcia Gay Harden, and Roy Scheider. His most recent television production was The Colt, an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel-prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, which aired on The Hallmark Channel. For his screenplay of The Colt, Harrigan was nominated for a Writers Guild Award and the Humanitas Prize. Young Caesar, a feature adaptation of Conn Iggulden’s Emperor novels, which he co-wrote with William Broyles, Jr., is currently in development with Exclusive Media.
A 1971 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where he is a faculty fellow at UT’s James A. Michener Center for Writers and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly. He is also a founding member of CAST (Capital Area Statues, Inc.) an organization in Austin that commissions monumental works of art as gifts to the city. He is the recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s Texas Writers Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters, and was recently inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Stephen Harrigan and his wife Sue Ellen have three daughters and four grandchildren.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
December 1, 2013
I was born the year an American first traveled into space, and I grew up calculating everybody's coolness by how close they were to NASA. My mother had been Alan Shepard's daughter's synchronized swimming coach (middling cool), but my father worked on the systems leading up to the Apollo program, which sent his coolness quotient to the moon. My friends and I drank Tang and used pens that could write upside down because that's what the astronauts did. Little boys (and big ones, too) dreamed of colonies on Mars by the early 21st century. But of course, a funny thing happened on the way to the final frontier. Those Apollo missions started to feel a little mundane (no aliens up there?). Then in 1979 a disintegrating Skylab made us all duck and cover. And by the time Challenger exploded in 1986, the whole enterprise seemed sad and aimless. Besides, technological wonders had moved from the galaxy to the living room. Little boys (and big ones, too) now dream of getting "My Humps" on an iPod.
And yet the space program keeps flying along, albeit a lackluster sequel to the drama reached on the Sea of Tranquility in 1969. Small groups of men and -- finally -- women regularly strap themselves to 2.5 million gallons of fuel, shoot into earth orbit for a few days and then skid home on a wave of fire without tickertape parades or White House ceremonies. The weirdly routine nature of this otherworldly work provides a fascinating setting for Stephen Harrigan's Challenger Park . It's a blast to the present after his well-received historical novel The Gates of the Alamo (2000). But as his characters break the sound barrier, he's breaking the gender barrier: This is a super-macho novel all about the trials of motherhood . As a publishing venture, that's as risky as looking for water on Mars, but Knopf is set to launch 100,000 copies. It'll take a rare alignment of space flight fanatics and domestic fiction readers to make that pay off, but Challenger Park deserves it.
The story opens in 2001 at the NASA facility in Texas. Harrigan's heroine is Lucy Kincheloe, a devoted wife and mother who thinks she has the right stuff to endure the demands of family life while carrying on a full-time job as an astronaut in training. Although there's plenty of opportunity here for creaking, chauvinistic jokes, Harrigan never moves in that direction. In fact, he's about as funny as a NASA press release, but he's smart, sensitive and deeply committed to studying this family during a period of extraordinary challenge.
"She had not yet flown in space," he writes, "but she lived, had always lived, for the day when her rational, achieving mind would earn her a mystical departure from the earth." When that opportunity finally comes, she has to deal with all the demands of intensified training and the bitterness of her husband, an experienced shuttle astronaut whose career is sinking fast. Her son's chronic asthma constantly makes her wonder if she can dare leave him alone. (Christa McAuliffe's ultimate sacrifice haunts Lucy throughout the novel.) And on top of all this, she falls in love with her flight trainer, a decent older man who's still mourning the death of his wife.
Will Lucy's marriage survive the stress of disaffection and adultery? That's a moot point if she doesn't survive her dangerous shuttle mission, which Harrigan portrays expertly: long stretches of regimented tedium interrupted by moments of sheer terror.
The setting may be out of this world, but Challenger Park is really a rather old-fashioned feminist story about a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her family. You don't need to be an astronaut to endure "the anxiety-ridden wonder of motherhood." And anyone who drops a child off at day care can sympathize with Lucy when she feels "like she was cutting corners in a part of her life where compromise should never be considered." It takes courage to fly into space, of course, but Harrigan knows that it takes courage to fix a bad marriage, too, and what parent wouldn't rather float outside a damaged shuttle than listen to her asthmatic child gasp for breath?
Harrigan's descriptions of space training and flight sound as though he could pilot the shuttle himself, but what's more impressive ultimately is his knowledge of the conflicted feelings of a woman struggling to figure out what matters to her most. "Why would any mother," Lucy thinks in a moment of crippling self-doubt, "voluntarily leave her child to travel to such a place, a place that was as blank as death, and in whose perfect soundlessness his cries to her were sure to go unheard?" The gravity of that question has weighed down women since they first dared to look up. Lucy's answer won't satisfy everyone, but it's explored here with great insight and a bracing touch of adventure.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
And yet the space program keeps flying along, albeit a lackluster sequel to the drama reached on the Sea of Tranquility in 1969. Small groups of men and -- finally -- women regularly strap themselves to 2.5 million gallons of fuel, shoot into earth orbit for a few days and then skid home on a wave of fire without tickertape parades or White House ceremonies. The weirdly routine nature of this otherworldly work provides a fascinating setting for Stephen Harrigan's Challenger Park . It's a blast to the present after his well-received historical novel The Gates of the Alamo (2000). But as his characters break the sound barrier, he's breaking the gender barrier: This is a super-macho novel all about the trials of motherhood . As a publishing venture, that's as risky as looking for water on Mars, but Knopf is set to launch 100,000 copies. It'll take a rare alignment of space flight fanatics and domestic fiction readers to make that pay off, but Challenger Park deserves it.
The story opens in 2001 at the NASA facility in Texas. Harrigan's heroine is Lucy Kincheloe, a devoted wife and mother who thinks she has the right stuff to endure the demands of family life while carrying on a full-time job as an astronaut in training. Although there's plenty of opportunity here for creaking, chauvinistic jokes, Harrigan never moves in that direction. In fact, he's about as funny as a NASA press release, but he's smart, sensitive and deeply committed to studying this family during a period of extraordinary challenge.
"She had not yet flown in space," he writes, "but she lived, had always lived, for the day when her rational, achieving mind would earn her a mystical departure from the earth." When that opportunity finally comes, she has to deal with all the demands of intensified training and the bitterness of her husband, an experienced shuttle astronaut whose career is sinking fast. Her son's chronic asthma constantly makes her wonder if she can dare leave him alone. (Christa McAuliffe's ultimate sacrifice haunts Lucy throughout the novel.) And on top of all this, she falls in love with her flight trainer, a decent older man who's still mourning the death of his wife.
Will Lucy's marriage survive the stress of disaffection and adultery? That's a moot point if she doesn't survive her dangerous shuttle mission, which Harrigan portrays expertly: long stretches of regimented tedium interrupted by moments of sheer terror.
The setting may be out of this world, but Challenger Park is really a rather old-fashioned feminist story about a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her family. You don't need to be an astronaut to endure "the anxiety-ridden wonder of motherhood." And anyone who drops a child off at day care can sympathize with Lucy when she feels "like she was cutting corners in a part of her life where compromise should never be considered." It takes courage to fly into space, of course, but Harrigan knows that it takes courage to fix a bad marriage, too, and what parent wouldn't rather float outside a damaged shuttle than listen to her asthmatic child gasp for breath?
Harrigan's descriptions of space training and flight sound as though he could pilot the shuttle himself, but what's more impressive ultimately is his knowledge of the conflicted feelings of a woman struggling to figure out what matters to her most. "Why would any mother," Lucy thinks in a moment of crippling self-doubt, "voluntarily leave her child to travel to such a place, a place that was as blank as death, and in whose perfect soundlessness his cries to her were sure to go unheard?" The gravity of that question has weighed down women since they first dared to look up. Lucy's answer won't satisfy everyone, but it's explored here with great insight and a bracing touch of adventure.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
March 28, 2010
Challenger Park. Stephen Harrigan. 2006. Alfred A. Knopf. 397 pages.
Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan is an AMAZING novel about a woman astronaut named Lucy Kincheloe as she prepares for her first space mission.
Lucy is a mother of two children and married to another astronaut, Brian, whose ego threatens his own future career as an astronaut. In the midst of dealing with her husband's animosity and her son's serious asthmatic problems, Lucy finds herself drifting closer to the trainer for her space mission, Walt Womack. In addition to Lucy's life drama, readers are indulgently treated to the vast details surrounding preparation and training for an actual mission to outer space!
As a reader, I have lots of wonderful things to say about Challenger Park. First, Stephen Harrigan proves he is an excellent author by making what could have been a potentially boring subject into something so interesting that I couldn't put the book down. Readers will not need to be sci-fi nerds or space enthusiasts to have genuine interest in space missions and the scenarios presented by Challenger Park. Lucy's character is extremely intelligent, which makes her incredibly intriguing and leaves readers eager to learn how she deals with stress and the obstacles thrown at her. We also learn numerous facts and tidbits about the history of space exploration and are given an inside look on the lives of astronauts.
Readers will find that Stephen Harrigan performed extensive and wonderful research to put Challenger Park together, and I highly recommend this book as a must-read.
Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan is an AMAZING novel about a woman astronaut named Lucy Kincheloe as she prepares for her first space mission.
Lucy is a mother of two children and married to another astronaut, Brian, whose ego threatens his own future career as an astronaut. In the midst of dealing with her husband's animosity and her son's serious asthmatic problems, Lucy finds herself drifting closer to the trainer for her space mission, Walt Womack. In addition to Lucy's life drama, readers are indulgently treated to the vast details surrounding preparation and training for an actual mission to outer space!
As a reader, I have lots of wonderful things to say about Challenger Park. First, Stephen Harrigan proves he is an excellent author by making what could have been a potentially boring subject into something so interesting that I couldn't put the book down. Readers will not need to be sci-fi nerds or space enthusiasts to have genuine interest in space missions and the scenarios presented by Challenger Park. Lucy's character is extremely intelligent, which makes her incredibly intriguing and leaves readers eager to learn how she deals with stress and the obstacles thrown at her. We also learn numerous facts and tidbits about the history of space exploration and are given an inside look on the lives of astronauts.
Readers will find that Stephen Harrigan performed extensive and wonderful research to put Challenger Park together, and I highly recommend this book as a must-read.
August 31, 2008
Rarely does a book ring as true as “Challenger Park.” The characters are as real as our friends, family and co-workers. The story ropes us in from the start, but then guides us along rather than pulling tight. The writing is colorful when it needs to be, terse when it needs to be, and invisible when it needs to be - an art in itself.
Harrington strikes all the right notes in his story of astronauts and support crews at NASA, the long, grueling training for a space launch, and the shadow of danger that lurks behind every mission. His keen eye for detail lends extra depth to the settings and characters alike.
“Challenger Park” shows that astronauts are as human as the rest of us. Despite reaching for the stars, their lives are mostly mundane: their relationships are complicated, their families aren’t perfect, their conversations could have been overheard in any restaurant or whispered over any phone. And we care about what happens to them; we laugh at them, cry with them and fear for their safety.
The ending isn’t Hollywood, but it’s real: Sometimes both options involve a sacrifice. We may question the decision Lucy makes, but deep down we knew what she would choose.
Harrington strikes all the right notes in his story of astronauts and support crews at NASA, the long, grueling training for a space launch, and the shadow of danger that lurks behind every mission. His keen eye for detail lends extra depth to the settings and characters alike.
“Challenger Park” shows that astronauts are as human as the rest of us. Despite reaching for the stars, their lives are mostly mundane: their relationships are complicated, their families aren’t perfect, their conversations could have been overheard in any restaurant or whispered over any phone. And we care about what happens to them; we laugh at them, cry with them and fear for their safety.
The ending isn’t Hollywood, but it’s real: Sometimes both options involve a sacrifice. We may question the decision Lucy makes, but deep down we knew what she would choose.
December 26, 2022
I kept hoping this book would get better. It is well written but so slow and boring. It look me a while to get through it. But I did love all the Texas references!
May 31, 2016
When reading the description of this novel, I was excited to see a fictional account of an astronaut in the days of the Space Shuttle program. I'd say that about 1/3 of the novel (that may be generous) is packed with an interesting story of mission training, launch and coping with several malfunctions that change the course of the mission the main character trained for.
Unfortunately, the other 2/3 of the novel were slow moving and packed with pathos about an unhappy marriage, an affair, motherly guilt, fear about a child's health problems, several characters' life tragedies, and most tangentially, a priest's crisis of faith. It got to a point where I skimmed through Lucy's endless pearl clutching over her life and the conversations between Walt and Luis about nothing having anything to do with the rest of the story. The characters of Lucy and Walt constantly made me think of Grey's Anatomy. These characters have important jobs to do, but they're focused on themselves and their own angst most of the time.
After a while, I just wanted this book to be over.
Unfortunately, the other 2/3 of the novel were slow moving and packed with pathos about an unhappy marriage, an affair, motherly guilt, fear about a child's health problems, several characters' life tragedies, and most tangentially, a priest's crisis of faith. It got to a point where I skimmed through Lucy's endless pearl clutching over her life and the conversations between Walt and Luis about nothing having anything to do with the rest of the story. The characters of Lucy and Walt constantly made me think of Grey's Anatomy. These characters have important jobs to do, but they're focused on themselves and their own angst most of the time.
After a while, I just wanted this book to be over.
Read
February 5, 2009Its first sentence, which puts our heroine at the intersection of NASA Road One and Space Center Boulevard, clearly shows the novel's attention to the minutiae of astronaut life. Reviewers opined differently about the obsessive NASA details; some felt the jargon slowed down what is a very internal narrative about Lucy's struggle to balance career with family__a timeless battle, surely, and one the author handles with admirable delicacy. Lucy's nail-biting propulsion into space is a page-turner, but her extramarital dalliance develops slowly__and comes across as very decent. Which is mostly commendable. Writes the New York Times Book Review: "The two dutiful, abashed and guilty people he's created strike me as the most refreshing literary lovers in a long, overheated time."
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
November 25, 2009
I was drawn to this because it takes place where I grew up. That also is pretty much the only reason it gets two stars. It is pretty cool to read a book that is based on a place you spend 20 years living in, especially when it is as unheralded as Clear Lake, TX. It was also an interesting insight into the day to day lives of astronauts, who are no longer the celebrities they were in the days of going to the moon, but still live quite fascinating lives.
That said, the NASA and Bay Area facade drew me into what was basically a romantic novel. Two astronauts are married and have kids, she falls in love with someone else at NASA, blah blah blah. I guess if you like that thing then this wouldn't be an awful book to read, but I am not a romance novel guy and can't give it a much higher rating than this.
That said, the NASA and Bay Area facade drew me into what was basically a romantic novel. Two astronauts are married and have kids, she falls in love with someone else at NASA, blah blah blah. I guess if you like that thing then this wouldn't be an awful book to read, but I am not a romance novel guy and can't give it a much higher rating than this.
February 8, 2018
I was surprised by this book. Hidden in a box among well known novels by some big names, was this Harrigan novel. The beginning started a little slow when Lucy was home with the kids, waiting for Brian to return to Earth. Her frustrations and resentments against her husband urged her toward the poor choices she, herself, would make. But through it all, her infidelity, her trip to the ISS, and her return, Brian took care of his family. While it feels like Lucy is to be our protagonist and Brian our antagonist, I couldn't help feeling bad for Brian when Lucy remained selfish up until the end. Ultimately, this book sucked me in and I couldn't put it down for the last 150 pages or so. I needed to know what was going to happen to them all. Take a read, what do you think?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 5, 2013
I strongly disliked this boring, whiny, too long novel about man-woman relationships, children, marital conflicts and a weak priest of all things. I thought this story extremely annoying. I couldn't wait to finish this just to be done with it...and it exceeded with a mighty disappointing finish.
March 23, 2008
More of a love story than a space buff book. However, feel a little bit eerie after learned the Lisa Nowak incident.
March 13, 2008
This story was slow to build for me, but I really liked the look into the day-to-day lives of astronauts.
January 30, 2023
Challenger Park tries to be a story about space flight, but it also tries to be a family drama about love and relationships and motherhood, and in trying to be both, it feels frustratingly like neither. I'm not sure I'd be thrilled by an astronaut like Lucy. Throughout I got Sandra Bullock in Gravity vibes, and I pictured that video of Chris Hadfield ranting about how that movie was disrespectful to every female astronaut that had ever lived. That's how Lucy made me feel. I mean the book is compelling; its readable. The pages turn, and the space flight aspects seem pretty accurate based on my excessive amount of reading on space flight. And its that that keeps you turning pages. But the drama, Lucy's inner dialogue, the angst! If this was purely a dramatic novel, it would be spot on. But in a space flight novel, a recent one, when the members of astronaut corps are picked for their temperament as much as their skills and experience...well a book like this feels like it makes a bit of a mockery of that. Still an interesting read, just maybe it should have been two separate books.
November 9, 2017
Challenger Park was my fourth Stephen Harrigan novel (after A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, Gates of the Alamo, and Remember Ben Clayton), so I guess that makes me a fan. Like the others, I experienced this one as an audiobook. Like all of Harrigan's novels, this one has a strong woman — astronaut Lucy Kincheloe —as a central character. Lucy is torn between profession and family, between her ambition to fly in space and the risk her upcoming mission entails, not only for herself but for her two small children if it should end in disaster — a small but real possibility, to which the "Challenger" in the title alludes. Lucy also deals with another conflict, between her waining feelings for her
difficult husband (also an astronaut) and her growing attraction for the head of her mission-training team. Like all Harrigan's novels, this one is character-driven, although it does have some twists that propel the narrative and confront the characters with difficult choices.
difficult husband (also an astronaut) and her growing attraction for the head of her mission-training team. Like all Harrigan's novels, this one is character-driven, although it does have some twists that propel the narrative and confront the characters with difficult choices.
June 4, 2017
Probably 3.5 stars.
June 21, 2022
While I loved the insight into astronaut training, I was less than impressed with the main character (Lucy) and felt that her husband Brian was not fully developed. Kind of left me thinking “ugh.”
July 5, 2024
Good summer read.
September 21, 2025
I was amazed at finding out the details that astronauts go thru. Can't see how we will ever be able to leave our solar system. The cost is overwhelming.
April 3, 2025
Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan
Lucy had allowed a door to be opened that she could never walk through, but the thought of that
door being subsequently closed was a torment … she was casting a shadow over her family, a shadow whose reach could not yet be reckoned.
Even before Louis had started in about wasting his life Walt had been feeling the same looming
possibility for himself. The opportunities that arose in life were not always tidy, not always right.
But it had to be a mistake—a kind of moral surrender of its own—to accustom yourself to turning
them down.
These excerpts from Stephen Harrigan’s highly enjoyable Challenger Park introduce the three main characters:
• Lucy, mother, wife of a seasoned astronaut and astronaut herself training for her first space mission,
• Walt, recent widower and highly experienced NASA mission training supervisor
• and Louis, Catholic priest andWalt’s life-long friend who is questioning his life and faith.
In this highly researched work Harrigan gives us three characters struggling with what their lives might have been while examining what is most important now as they face important personal decisions. This is an adventure story, an expository on what it means to be an astronaut and a love story. Harrigan succeeds on all three fronts. For me there was much added enjoyment in the Clear Lake, Texas setting which Harrigan so accurately brought out.
Finally, Harrigan also captured what is a continuing frustration for those who served NASA in those early, heady days of space exploration:
“Low earth orbit? When did the whole idea of spaceflight change from actually going
somewhere to going around and around? I mean, you have to admit it’s gotten to be kind of a
joke. When we were kids we had people on the moon! NASA had serious plans to go to Mars!
Now all they can do is send us up two hundred and forty miles. … the goals of the program
were never as sharp as the training and procedures necessary to achieve them.”
Lucy had allowed a door to be opened that she could never walk through, but the thought of that
door being subsequently closed was a torment … she was casting a shadow over her family, a shadow whose reach could not yet be reckoned.
Even before Louis had started in about wasting his life Walt had been feeling the same looming
possibility for himself. The opportunities that arose in life were not always tidy, not always right.
But it had to be a mistake—a kind of moral surrender of its own—to accustom yourself to turning
them down.
These excerpts from Stephen Harrigan’s highly enjoyable Challenger Park introduce the three main characters:
• Lucy, mother, wife of a seasoned astronaut and astronaut herself training for her first space mission,
• Walt, recent widower and highly experienced NASA mission training supervisor
• and Louis, Catholic priest andWalt’s life-long friend who is questioning his life and faith.
In this highly researched work Harrigan gives us three characters struggling with what their lives might have been while examining what is most important now as they face important personal decisions. This is an adventure story, an expository on what it means to be an astronaut and a love story. Harrigan succeeds on all three fronts. For me there was much added enjoyment in the Clear Lake, Texas setting which Harrigan so accurately brought out.
Finally, Harrigan also captured what is a continuing frustration for those who served NASA in those early, heady days of space exploration:
“Low earth orbit? When did the whole idea of spaceflight change from actually going
somewhere to going around and around? I mean, you have to admit it’s gotten to be kind of a
joke. When we were kids we had people on the moon! NASA had serious plans to go to Mars!
Now all they can do is send us up two hundred and forty miles. … the goals of the program
were never as sharp as the training and procedures necessary to achieve them.”
January 19, 2015
I read this book some years ago and , seeing the audiobook at my local library, thought it a good title to revisit. While the book was still good, it was an abridged edition, so missing some of the best parts of the novel. For example, I think most of the justification for Lucy's decision was rushed & premature. As a matter of fact, the entire novel felt this way. They also left some details of preparing for space flight from the text that I found interesting. (i.e. Astronauts pull an all-nighter before launch in order to better adjust their bodies to mission-time, where the day-night cycle is completely different/sped up and of no use to regulating a sleep-cycle.)
Having lived for several years in the Clear Lake/JSC area, I also paid attention(too much!) to the details Mr. Harrigan put into where things were located. I can assure you, some artistic liberties were taken. Also, a note to Mr. Sam Freed and the audiobook team at Random House: The name of the cafeteria frequented by Walt, Luby's, is pronounced with a long "u"(i.e. rhymes with ruby; not hubby). Annoyed me to no end ever time he said it wrong.
Having lived for several years in the Clear Lake/JSC area, I also paid attention(too much!) to the details Mr. Harrigan put into where things were located. I can assure you, some artistic liberties were taken. Also, a note to Mr. Sam Freed and the audiobook team at Random House: The name of the cafeteria frequented by Walt, Luby's, is pronounced with a long "u"(i.e. rhymes with ruby; not hubby). Annoyed me to no end ever time he said it wrong.
January 13, 2016
I love the setting and the occupation of the main characters, married female astronaut Lucy and her family, the young boy with asthma and a younger daughter.. her husband Brian is also an astronaut, with more experience but troubled. I enjoyed the sense of what it must be like to go through training and to experience a space shuttle launch and living on the space station. I was deeply moved by and Lucy's dedication to her children. along with her desire to fly in space. another main character is her trainer Walt, a widower. I have mixed feelings about where the story goes in this novel, but it captivated me and I could not stop listening until I was finished yesterday. Hence three stars, though I wanted to give 4.incidentally, this is one of the first books I found and put on my list when I joined audible.com several years ago, but I held back reading it until now. I'm glad I finally did read it. I feel both sad and glad for the characters by the end.
August 13, 2010
Well written book, but deliberate language in a way that is at first sort of hard to get into. The central romantic relationship is at times unbelievable/isn't developed adequately. The author's description of space-related stuff seems quite impressive and lent authenticity and some suspense to the novel.
August 10, 2007
I loved this book on many levels: the NASA insider info, the portrait of a mediocre marriage, the daily drama of life as a mom.
Throw in a trip to outer space, and there's not much more you can ask for.
Throw in a trip to outer space, and there's not much more you can ask for.
April 1, 2010
I enjoyed reading about the space center, the training and the missions. I also really enjoyed reading about the places that were mentioned in the book. I wasn't that drawn to the characters, but I'm glad I read the book. It was really fun.
December 23, 2007
i don't know. this is another unlikely audio book the austin public library has bestowed upon me. so far, i don't hate it, and harrigan is at least writing well about children.
March 17, 2009
The actual space stuff/experiences was very interesting but way to little of the book! The rest was soooooo whiny!
May 22, 2017
Aaaangsty aaaastronauts.
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