BKMT READING GUIDES
The Time It Takes to Fall: A Novel
by Margaret Lazarus Dean
Paperback : 336 pages
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At school, Dolores finds herself caught between her desire for popularity and her secret friendship with ...
Introduction
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.
Excerpt
Chapter OneMy sister Delia and I were splayed on the floor in front of the afternoon shows when we heard the familiar slam of our own car door. We ran to the window. It was only three o'clock. My father had never come home from work early; often, in the push to prepare one launch after another in a continually quickening schedule, he worked late and didn't come home during daylight hours at all. ...
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Discussion Questions
1. Do you remember where you were on January 28, 1986, the day of the Challenger disaster? Did you watch the explosion live on TV as a school kid, like Dolores Gray? (As part of its Teacher in Space program, NASA arranged for public schools to get live cable feeds of the launch; no broadcast network carried it.) How does Dolores’ account of the event compare with your own memories or impressions of this national tragedy?2. As a girl, Dolores dreams of growing up to be an astronaut like her heroine, Judith Resnik. When you were a child, did you fantasize about space travel or some other thrilling career? Did you have an idol? Were you ever inspired by a daring woman?
3. THE TIME IT TAKES TO FALL is told from the perspective of a girl between the ages of eleven and thirteen. Did your image of and feelings towards Dolores change as the novel progressed?
4. Dolores goes from sharing a special bond with her father, Frank, to despising him. Do you understand why she made a conscious decision to hate the man she had always adored and admired? Do you think Dolores was justified in blaming her father for her mother’s behavior?
5. How would you characterize Dolores’ mother, Deborah? Could you relate to her frustrations and fears? Why do you suppose she left her daughters as well as her husband? Do you view her actions as selfish?
6. The tension between Dolores’ parents is aggravated by their financial dependence on the success of NASA. How can the threat of unemployment take a toll on a marriage? How might surviving a layoff and its aftermath make a family stronger?
7. Do you think Deborah had an affair with Mr. Biersdorfer? Do you wish the author hadn’t left the nature of their relationship a mystery?
8. How would you describe Dolores’ relationship with Eric Biersdorfer? What drew them together? Was it their common lack of popularity or something deeper? Have you ever been attracted to an oddball or an outcast, in spite of yourself?
9. What compelled Dolores to call Rick Landry, the Cincinnati Observer reporter, and divulge her father’s knowledge of a problem with the Solid Rocket Booster design? Did you view it as an act of courage or childishness? Were you surprised to learn the actual technical causes for the Challenger explosion? Could you speculate on why the NASA organization allowed a flawed design to keep flying?
10. How does Dolores’ coming-of-age story mirror America’s loss of innocence about manned space flight?
11. What was your reaction to the revelation that the seven astronauts on the Challenger shuttle were still alive after the explosion? What might have been going through their minds in those two minutes and forty-five seconds while falling back to earth?
12. What are your views on America’s current financial investment in and commitment to space exploration? Do you have any hopes or dreams for the future of spaceflight? If you had the opportunity to fly into outer space and perhaps land on the Moon or Mars, would you seize it, regardless of the risks?
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
Dolores Gray is a young girl growing up in the shadow of NASA who dreams of flying in space. In a household wracked by job loss and marital turmoil, Dolores must struggle to maintain a normal life as her surroundings grow increasingly unstable. Then, on the morning of January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes, and all seven astronauts on board are killed. The disaster not only shocks the world, but the ensuing investigation threatens to tear apart her family and community. Can Dolores find a way to reconstruct her life without losing sight of her dreams? What made you want to write this book? What was the idea that sparked your imagination? In the mid-nineties, I came across a website about Challenger that included a “Memory Forum”—a place where visitors were invited to share their memories of where they were and what they were doing when the space shuttle exploded. One of the memories was from a woman about my age (thirteen at the time of the disaster). She described watching the launch in a classroom with her teacher and classmates. This was exactly what I remembered too, but when the shuttle exploded, she wrote, all the kids ran outside to see the cloud formations in the sky. The signature from her post put her in Christmas, Florida, which I later learned is a small town on the Space Coast. I was captivated by the idea of these kids watching the launch on TV like all the other kids in the country, but once they realized something had gone wrong, wanting to see it in person. The image of those kids running outside to see the clouds of smoke stayed with me, and I started writing about them, about what it must have been like to see the disaster that way, many of them knowing that their parents had worked on this shuttle, that their jobs might be at stake now. That story became THE TIME IT TAKES TO FALL. What do you want readers to take away with them after reading the book? Part of my motivation in writing this novel was to create a believable teenage girl—not a cleaned-up or sentimental version of adolesence, but a real character who isn’t perfect. I started with the idea of the Challenger disaster, and Dolores, her family, and her friends just grew out of that. I learned so much about NASA and about spaceflight while researching this novel—I wanted all of the details to be as realistic as possible. I hope that through Dolores’s story, readers will learn something they can keep with them.Book Club Recommendations
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