Reviewed by Julie Mollins
8.23.07

The vivid image of Space Shuttle Challenger dissolving into white entrails of smoke is etched into the memory of anyone who witnessed it explode against the Florida sky. The crisis in the wake of the Challenger tragedy in 1986, underpins the experiences of an adolescent girl coming of age in Margaret Lazarus Dean’s debut novel The Time it Takes to Fall.

Dean weaves together an insider’s story of the space-shuttle program and the life of protagonist
Dolores Gray with a thread of cynicism about both adolescence and space technology.
The gifted teenage daughter of a technician working for NASA, Dolores counts among her friends the children of employees of the space agency. As her friendships develop and Dolores matures, she starts to recognize human fallibility and finds herself with new-found social powers—and an ability to manipulate those around her.

The Time it Takes to Fall portrays with careful precision the discomforts of teenage life and the social chaos that can be unleashed as independence is first discovered. An example: Dolores has a crush on a boy at school, but doesn’t think twice about making up horror stories about him in order to curry favor with her girlfriends. She also has to cope with the challenges created by her mother’s wandering eye and her father’s single-minded focus on his job.

Dolores admires her father and yearns to become an astronaut. Instead of scribbling in a personal journal, as was the tendency of many teens at the time, she keeps a detailed notebook on the events surrounding each shuttle launch she attends with her father.

In some ways, The Time it Takes to Fall is a typical coming-of-age story because it focuses on the human potential for manufacturing and coping with evil. Dean does not make a new or revolutionary statement on the challenges of adolescence. However, she broadens what would otherwise be a typical story of teen angst by structuring the story around factual information to do with NASA and the Challenger explosion.

Dean enhances the sense of the fear experienced by an adolescent stepping out into the darkness of new experience and risk by paralleling Dolores’s story with the failure of technology of the space program. The book also examines the way marriage, schools, politics and the news media shape society.

Dolores’s high school teacher, Dr. Schuler, is a semifinalist among the applicants to the Teacher in Space program. “He had written essays explaining why he should be the Teacher in Space and a proposal describing his project: a study on fluid dynamics in microgravity. Probably his project had been too scientifically rigorous he told us; probably that was why he hadn’t been chosen. Once Christa McAuliffe won with her diary proposal, Dr. Schuler said, he realized that he should have dumbed it down.”

The literary device in which fact intersects with fiction allows Dean to vividly present the fate of actual schoolteacher, McAuliffe, who was killed along with six crew members when Challenger exploded. Dean describes classroom dynamics with great insight and wit. After having Dolores give teacher Schuler an incorrect answer in class, Dean describes Dolores’s reaction: “I was so certain I was giving him the answer he wanted, an answer he’d be impressed with,” she mulls. “The girl next to me gave me a sympathetic look, and when Dr. Schuler’s back was turned, she stuck out her tongue and flashed a middle finger in his direction. She was clearly expert at this sort of behavior—she knew just when to put the finger away as Dr. Schuler turned back toward the room without seeming to hurry, without losing her cool.”

Ultimately, The Time it Takes to Fall is a tale about confronting and denying mortality. “They fall for two minutes and forty-five seconds, longer than anyone else has ever fallen unfettered,” Dean writes of the ill-fated Challenger astronauts:

They have more time to contemplate their impending deaths than anyone ever to feel the acceleration of thirty-two feet per second. But—and this is the odd thing about falling—no matter how far they fall, no matter how long they wait and how certain they are now that no parachute, no net, nothing can save them, in the moment just before impact, they are still perfectly whole, breathing, living, and in that state it is impossible, impossible to believe in their own deaths.

This month, more than 21 years after McAuliffe’s untimely death, Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off with teacher Barbara Morgan on board. Morgan trained with McAuliffe.