Review: One Giant Leap

One Giant Leap by Kay Simone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When you look up at the night sky, what do you feel?



Do you wonder about what's out there? Do you feel as though you're looking out on something so greatly important that it will shape and change the future of our existence? Or do you just see bright lights in the sky? Or a lack thereof because you live in a densely populated city with so much light pollution that you can barely see any stars?



Or are you like Curtis "Launchpad" Larkin and you're crying because you think you won't ever see them up close again?



I found this book by accident. I was browsing through one of my favourite Facebook groups for M/M recommendations and someone asked for a book where someone faints - for whatever reason. I thought, "Hey, now that actually could be interesting!" and I started reading through some of the recs. The last one on the list was One Giant Leap and the premise that this would be a love affair with an astronaut had my heart racing for a moment. I have a fascination with all things space and space-related - I even watch the NASA channel on TV when they're doing spacewalks on the ISS so why wouldn’t this one appeal to me? That Curt, the mission commander, falls for his CAPCOM in mission control sight unseen with only his voice and personality to judge by? That really piqued my curiosity.

"CAPCOM to Mission Commander, do you read?"

The first time those words are spoken, it starts a dialogue between two souls who love space. The vast infinity of the stars and the promise of something more to learn, more to explore, more to find out there meaning that they are greater than the sum of their parts on Earth. It isn't an immediate connection - that would be false and nowhere near as powerful as the love story of Curt Larkin and Patrick Harte deserves to be. Yes, this is a relationship that builds slowly over time. It's a time window that seems short in some ways and unbearably long in others, but the end result is something sweeter and more beautiful than I think I have ever read. It's reached my list of all-time favourites, and I don't think that will ever change.

Curt Larkin - disgraced astronaut forced to resign to save face for NASA when an encounter with a Moon landing denouncer in a bar leaves him under arrest and makes him the centre of a scandal that allows the politicians to debate the merits of spending on the manned space flight program.



This is something that governments have been talking about for years, for all the money that's pumped into NASA, how far have we gone? What new do we know? Actually, we know a lot more now than the politicians think we do, but they try to denounce every breakthrough and colour the opinions of the public through tainted lenses.



Curt's forced resignation leaves him feeling without a tether to the Earth. He has no real connection to his family, no one to share his life with and so, that time became a spiral into drunken despair. He moved as far as he could out to an area of Texas where the light pollution was so small he could truly see the stars from the ground that he was sure he would never see again. His drunken ramblings after hearing of plans to disassemble NASA and the space program by the current leadership finds him drunk in a bar spouting poetic about the space program and the idiocy of politicians all while being captured on some college kid's smartphone. It brings him the attention and the power to bring him back to NASA, to inspire the people to try and fund a manned mission through crowdfunding and get the administration to pay attention. It's inspiring and features two real-life men I admire (though with similar but different names) to back him being the potential leader of this crowd-funded mission.



I'm gonna just leave them there…



But he's still lonely. Curt is still untethered to the Earth even when he's preparing to go up in the Hermes I shuttle. This will be his last mission. He's going to turn forty on the trip and when he's back on the ground he's going to retire, but to do what?

MORALES: So even if you’re asked to in the future, you'll never go to space again?

(Larkin pauses, looking at a point somewhere past the camera. He looks enormously sad at the question.)

LARKIN: Until NASA has one of those scifi style one-way missions where they need a volunteer who's ready to never come back to earth? No, I'll never go to space after this.

Patrick Harte dreamed of being an astronaut. He even begged his parents to send him to space camp as a child, but having Meniere's disease meant that his hopes were dashed upon diagnosis. He would never go to space himself, like his childhood crush Curt Larkin, but maybe there was a way that he could help humanity, help the space program, help those people who risked their lives to further the exploration of the universe. He's an engineer, usually one of those backroom engineers who design and fix problems, not one of the people sitting in mission control and when he winds up being chosen as the only person who could possibly be the new CAPCOM when the current one has a stroke while on duty, Patrick can’t believe it. He can't see that he deserves it, that he's anyone special enough to deserve that kind of responsibility, and he doesn't know that he can do it.



This book was watching two beautiful souls come together. And yes, Curt does faint when he finally sees Patrick for the first time and it is a glorious moment meant for the history books! There are bumps along the way, hurdles to jump just like any other courtship and one that gets a fair bit of attention is the fact that Curt is older than Patrick, 40 to his 27. It isn’t a noticeable thing all things considered, nor does it seem like something meant to be an impasse to their relationship. One of the most beautiful things I've ever heard comes from the subject:

"I don't know how else you can explain the fact the solid reality that out of every century on earth, out of every epoch, with every different combination of atoms and cells and situations out of the sheer chaos of the universe, you and I just happened to exist on the same planet at the same time," Patrick says. "If that's not luck, those are some pretty incredible odds we just beat. What's thirteen years compared to the whole history of the galaxy?"

This is a beautiful book! I wish I could find more like it - there's so much wonderful in there for everyone with a beautiful, touching love story making its slow burn across the pages ensuring that even after its end Curt and Patrick will live on forever in the stars above. If only we should take the chance and look up.

Grab this one - whether you grab it in Kindle Unlimited or you buy a copy like I did, Kay Simone wrote a phenomenal story that combines a love of science and the exploration of space with a heartwarming love story. You'll love it as much as I did, I'm sure! This one is also an amazing audiobook!!! I can't recommend it enough to anyone who loves slow burns and relationships that develop over long distances.



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