hot_goblin's review
1.0
Capturing the growth and decline of America’s investment in space is what Douglas Dechow and Anna Leahy aim to accomplish in their memoir Generation Space: A Love Story. By dissecting scientific details of space travel, these writers attempt to give a voice to their generation defined by space exploration. Ultimately, the novel fails to earn its own subtitle “A Love Story,” as so little of this novel is devoted to the actual writers, and this deeply severs any emotional investment and connectivity between the readers and the novel. Like the many shuttles in this memoir, this novel fails to take off.
Each chapter is either from the perspective of Doug or Anna, as each gives their personal experience with space and the impact it had on their lives. Each writer tries so desperately to cover so much of the history of space travel that they fail to include themselves into the story, and in doing so most chapters read like big blocks of information stripped from a textbook. The benefits of switching between narrators is lost, as both voices are identical. This intense focus on information over emotional investment leaves the current writer of the chapter seemingly meaningless. Yet this impersonal voice also makes the structure of the novel less accessible.
The narrative structure is disjointed, as both the journalistic research and the personal narrative aren’t engaging. The intimacy this novel allows with its writers is skin deep, as each author merely reinserts themselves into the narrative to recap the moral lesson learned from whatever was detailed earlier in the chapter. Without any real weight to the narrator’s voice, the personal elements of this memoir come off as more of an obligation and distraction from the mounds of information on space travel. This type of spoon-feeding information and emotion confuses the flow of narration and the overall intent of the novel.
Each chapter is either from the perspective of Doug or Anna, as each gives their personal experience with space and the impact it had on their lives. Each writer tries so desperately to cover so much of the history of space travel that they fail to include themselves into the story, and in doing so most chapters read like big blocks of information stripped from a textbook. The benefits of switching between narrators is lost, as both voices are identical. This intense focus on information over emotional investment leaves the current writer of the chapter seemingly meaningless. Yet this impersonal voice also makes the structure of the novel less accessible.
The narrative structure is disjointed, as both the journalistic research and the personal narrative aren’t engaging. The intimacy this novel allows with its writers is skin deep, as each author merely reinserts themselves into the narrative to recap the moral lesson learned from whatever was detailed earlier in the chapter. Without any real weight to the narrator’s voice, the personal elements of this memoir come off as more of an obligation and distraction from the mounds of information on space travel. This type of spoon-feeding information and emotion confuses the flow of narration and the overall intent of the novel.
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