Interesting Facts About Space

The offbeat and delightful latest from Austin (Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead) plunges readers into the quirky and turbulent inner life of Enid, an employee at a NASA-like agency. The episodic narrative follows Enid, who is gay, through her daily routine as she reckons with her painful past. She bakes a gender reveal cake for her pregnant half-sister Edna, despite finding the practice “profoundly offensive”; obsessively streams true crime podcasts; worries a mysterious bald man is stalking her (she also has an unexplained fear of bald men); and dates a poly couple. Eventually, she cautiously enters her first serious relationship with Polly, the ex-wife of another woman she’d briefly dated, and begins to confront agonizing memories of her late father, who left her mother for another woman. Enid’s preoccupation with random facts about space frequently appears in interactions with her mother (“Did you know astronomers found a planet without a star?” she asks her mother at the beginning of a phone call). Eventually, realizing she ought to deal with her phobia of bald men and her troubling memories, Enid begins seeing a therapist. The adventure inside her mind is engrossing, funny, and full of depth. Readers will fall for this unusual and lovable protagonist. (Jan.)