Review: The Wanderers by Meg Howrey

I'll be brave and admit, what first drew me to this book was the idea that it was about three astronauts who were to be sent to Mars. Mars. Imagine, three ordinary human beings spending months and months together in a tiny craft, travelling to a whole other planet. There is something intriguing about that. Except that this isn't quite what The Wanderers is about. It tells the story of three experienced and highly skilled astronauts who take part in a seventeen month simulation test, designed to mimic a trip to Mars and back. The Wanderers is, at its heart, a story about human resilience even in the most highly unusual circumstances. The storytelling is detailed and a little slow, and the chapters about Helen, Yoshi and Sergei are interspaced with chapters about the loved ones that they have left behind, and how their relationships are altered. There is a rather ambiguous twist along the way--one that I never did work out, but perhaps that is crucial part of the storytelling.

The difficulty of this one is even a day after I closed the cover for the last time, I am still not sure what I thought about it, or whether I enjoyed reading this one or not. There are certainly some interesting parallels with Mars One and asks some big questions about the human cost of such an ambitious project. 

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my copy of The Wanderers. 

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