The Time It Takes to Fall

It is the early 1980s, and America is in love with space. Growing up inthe shadow of Cape Canaveral, young Dolores Gray has it particularlybad: she dreams of becoming an astronaut.But at home, things are falling apart. As her father's job as a NASAtechnician is threatened, discord begins to grow between her parents. Atschool, there are still other problems: Dolores finds herself caughtbetween her desire for popularity and her secret friendship with thesmartest and most unpopular boy in...
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It is the early 1980s, and America is in love with space. Growing up inthe shadow of Cape Canaveral, young Dolores Gray has it particularlybad: she dreams of becoming an astronaut.But at home, things are falling apart. As her father's job as a NASAtechnician is threatened, discord begins to grow between her parents. Atschool, there are still other problems: Dolores finds herself caughtbetween her desire for popularity and her secret friendship with thesmartest and most unpopular boy in her class, whose father is NASA'sDirector of Launch Safety.Looking for escape, Dolores loses herself in her scrapbook, where shefiles away newspaper articles about the astronauts and the shuttles,weather reports on launch scrubs, and stories about her idol, JudithResnik.Then, on the morning of January 28, 1986, seventy-three seconds afterliftoff, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, killing all sevenastronauts on board - including Judith Resnik. It is a moment thatshakes America to its core, and nowhere is it more deeply felt than incentral Florida. Dolores becomes determined to reconstruct what wentwrong, both in her parent's marriage and at NASA, in the hope that shecan save her father's job and keep her family together.The Time It Takes To Fall is a coming-of-age novel that deftly weavesthe story of one family's drama into the larger picture of a touchstoneevent in American history. It is at once an intimate look at a younggirl'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 neverbe the same again.