THE TIME IT TAKES TO FALL: A NOVEL

Book ID/图书代码： 06580008B20521

English Summary/英文概要： It is the early 1980s, and America is in love with space. Growing up in the shadow of Cape Canaveral, young Dolores Gray has it particularly bad: she dreams of becoming an astronaut.
At school, Dolores finds herself caught between her desire for popularity and her secret friendship with the smartest and most unpopular boy in her class, whose father is NASA’s Director of Launch Safety. At home, discord begins to grow between her parents when her father’s job as a NASA technician is threatened.
Looking for escape, Dolores loses herself in her scrapbook, where she files away newspaper articles about the astronauts and the shuttles, weather reports on launch scrubs, and stories about her idol, Judith Resnik.
Then, on the morning of January 28, 1986, seventy-three seconds after liftoff, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing all seven astronauts on board -- including Judith Resnik. It is a moment that shakes America to its core, and nowhere is it more deeply felt than in central Florida. Dolores becomes determined to reconstruct what went wrong, both in her parent’s marriage and at NASA, in the hope that she can save her father’s job and keep her family together.
The Time It Takes to Fall is a coming-of-age novel that deftly weaves the story of one family’s drama into the larger picture of a touchstone event in American history. It is at once an intimate look at a young girl’s loss of innocence and a portrait of America’s loss of innocence -- the end of an era that romanticized manned space flight and would never be the same again.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 故事的背景為1980年代早期美國正值太空狂熱時期，1986年1月28日早上挑戰者號太空梭起飛73秒後便爆炸，七位太空人全都遇難。這個事件對於小女孩Dolores Gray影響極大，Dolores極為熱愛NASA甚至夢想能成為太空人。這個事件不僅讓她失去最崇拜的偶像太空人萊斯尼克，也讓她在NASA擔任技師的父親工作有了問題，使得父母間的感情也出現了裂痕。因此Dolores決定找出挑戰者號失事原因以及使父母重修舊好的方式。
Dolores在追查整個事件的過程中，逐漸成長的同時亦失去了原本的純真與狂熱，似乎象徵著美國已失去太空時期的單純期待與狂熱。

Awards/获奖情况：“Affecting, original debut about a girl’s coming-of-age, set against the backdrop of the NASA space-shuttle program…an accomplished first novel about the American family.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Margaret Dean’s beautifully adroit first novel is about a fine intelligence painfully located in a girl who can barely stand to be smart, and of a whole generation lifted up, and then brought down, by the Challenger disaster. The Time It Takes to Fall is a story of liftoffs and crash landings, of growing up and growing down. It is at once a meditation on American life—on what we know and what we can’t or don’t know—and a suspenseful page-turner.”
—查理．巴克斯特(Charles Baxter)，《愛情盛宴》 (The Feast of Love) 作者
“Taking as her backdrop the Challenger shuttle disaster, Dean subtly probes the hidden design flaws at the heart of the American family. Emulating the engineers and astronauts her characters orbit, her work is equal parts cool precision and wondrous dream. If a novel can be likened to a spacecraft—both are an intricate assembly of hundreds of thousands of parts—Dean’s is flawlessly constructed, ready to launch the reader on a soaring emotional trajectory.”
—何彼得‧戴維斯(Peter Ho Davies)，《威爾斯女孩》（The Welsh Girl）與《極醜之屋》（The Ugliest House in the World）作者
“The household represents a typical family during the Reagan era caught up in the materialism of buying things ‘to correct our incorrect lives.’ The result is a gripping judgment of American culture with a harrowing depiction in the epilog of the last few minutes in the lives of the Challenger’s seven astronauts. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“The Time it Takes to Fall is a deft reflection on the loss of national and personal innocence that skillfully explores a series of events rarely addressed in fine adult fiction. Writing might not be rocket science, but Dean’s first novel does the science and art of both proud.
—Bookpage
“The terrific title of the novel refers not only to a basic principle in physics and to the Challenger tragedy, but also to the unmeasurable and unknowable.”
—Boston Globe
“Dean gets the details of being a teenager right, from trips to the mall to the forbidden thrill of cutting class, and she captures the feel of the era too. Those who were children—and adults—during the time of the Challenger disaster will find in The Time It Takes to Fall a truthful and thought-provoking novel about how we face tragedies big and small.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Dean has created an immensely believable heroine and delivers a fascinating and approachable look at that most intimidating of all endeavors: rocket science. If there’s any justice at all, her book will be read by women’s book clubs across the country.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“This debut novel is a witness to the fall, from innocence surely, but more importantly from passive acceptance to an engaged struggle.”
—Bookslut Link to full review
"One of the nicest written coming-of-age stories that I’ve read in a long time. It’s always hard to think of what an author can do to make a coming-of-age tale new, and what Margaret Lazarus Dean does in her novel is...meld the public tragedy of the Challenger disaster with the private tragedy of Dolores’s family."
—Nancy Pearl, NPR, April 16, 2007
“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. Ultimately, The Time it Takes to Fall is a tale about confronting and denying mortality.”
—Small Spiral Notebook

About the Author/作者介绍： http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2007_02_010620.php
Margaret Lazarus Dean擁有密西根大學創作碩士，目前是密西根大學講師。此書是她的第一本小說，2007年精裝本初版。

Margaret Lazarus Dean grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received a BA in anthropology from Wellesley College and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor.
[close] Margaret Lazarus Dean grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received a BA in anthropology from Wellesley College and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor.

Format:HARDCOVER

Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE

Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

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