The thing about this series that has been nagging at me from the first book, but haven't been able to articulate to myself until now, is that it is simultaneously too hopeful and not hopeful enough. It makes it hard to believe in the hopeful future the books are clearly trying to work towards. Like, the timeskip in this book between the stress of the Earth Firster movement and the happy ending in the epilogue was.....a lot of work was just Skipped Over and it felt fake. They found one saboteur and now the entire movement isn't a significant and concerning problem anymore I guess??? And one of the the other effects of this hope/hopelessness is it also kind of makes me feel like the efforts at diversity are asking for an ally cookie instead of feeling like what would actually happen in the version of history posited by the series. Given how sexist/racist/homophobic/etc the powers that be are, would they really be letting all these people into space? Even given the dire urgency caused by the asteroid? Bigoted people will shoot themselves in their own foot facilitate their continued bigotry tbh!!

I rated the previous books in this series highly and wrote positive reviews, but I had a sense of unease all along that I just ignored because I couldn't figure out what I was reacting to. I'm still not sure I'm able to fully explain my position here, but. The above at least points towards it.

Anyway, let me talk more about this book specifically! This book focuses on a different female astronaut than the Lady Astronaut herself. The hero of this book is Nicole Wargin, caught between her professional ambitions and her role as a political spouse to support her husband. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story. But the main driving plot of the book is: there's one or more saboteurs on the moon, endangering everyone in the nascent colony there! And this was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL for me to read about, which made the whole book super hard for me to actually read. I nearly gave up on it several times.

This was made harder by the fact that I was reading it while away in a provincial park on a canoe trip with no internet access, so I couldn't google for spoilers to lower my stress levels as I otherwise would have!

I also was not a fan of the fact that Kenneth dies. I thought the relationship between Nicole and Kenneth was really interesting: complicated and with some significant underlying issues but also truly loving and supportive of each other and able to understand each other on a deep level despite all the issues. And then Kenneth just dies offscreen and Nicole mourns and moves on and achieves his original goal instead of him, of becoming president. Killing him off removes the main barriers in Nicole's personal/professional life, and it feels like he was killed to just get him out of the way, tbh. Nicole no longer has to navigate conflicting needs/desires within herself once Kenneth is gone. Very plot convenient.

Anyway I do overall still like this series, but not as much as I once did.