Goldilocks by Laura Lam
"Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation.
The team is humanity's last hope for survival, and Valerie has gathered the best women for the mission: an ace pilot who is one of the only astronauts ever to have gone to Mars; a brilliant engineer tasked with keeping the ship fully operational; and an experienced doctor to keep the crew alive. And then there's Naomi Lovelace, Valerie's surrogate daughter and the ship's botanist, who has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity to step out of Valerie's shadow and make a difference.
The problem is that they’re not the authorized crew, even if Valerie was the one to fully plan the voyage. When their mission is stolen from them, they steal the ship bound for the new planet.
But when things start going wrong on board, Naomi begins to suspect that someone is concealing a terrible secret -- and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . ."
“Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky ‘okay’, and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realizing the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.”
― Laura Lam, Goldilocks
This book started off with a bang! Five women steal a rocket and space ship after being pushed out of NASA. This book was gorgeous and oh so scary. It's not a horror book in the traditional sense, but damn does it paint a scarily realistic and bleak picture of the future. Everything in this book was far too believable. This book picks up after an uber-conservative president has been in power for four years and society has slowly pushed women out of positions of power under the pretense that it's for their own good. The world is only a couple of years away from environmental and economic collapse. I literally cried reading it, because nothing in it seemed out of the realm of possibility for the near future. But fun fact, we don't have the ability to up and leave this world for a better one. If this book isn't the biggest wake-up call that we need to do better than I don't know what is.
Lam did a fantastic job of weaving together a rather scientific story that was completely believable, with incredible and flawed characters that I absolutely loved. This book was painful to read at times. But incredibly important. It's also a testament that we need to work together to build a better future. We can't trust any one person, no matter how well-intentioned they are to plan the future for us. It's got to be a group effort.
I highly recommend this book, with the caveat that you should check the content warnings below. This book tackled some really heavy subjects. The subjects in this one are very important and this book felt like a necessary warning about what's to come if we keep going on the same trajectory.
Genre: sci-fi, lgbtqia+
Representation: bi & lesbian secondary characters, wlw
Content Warnings: abortion, miscarriage, maternal death, paternal death, misogyny, homophobia, violence, pandemic, genocide