She had every reason NOT to save him
Dr. Mary Goss spent her entire life being the smartest person in the room.
“That’s Doctor Know-It-All to you.”
Her professors gave her bad references because she’d corrected them one too many times. Every laboratory in Massachusetts turned her down. She was nineteen years old with a PhD from MIT—and nobody would hire her.
She finally dropped a résumé at the army recruitment office, a place she’d been avoiding for months; however, some inexplicable nudge kept pushing her toward it. She figured they’d never call.
They called.
Defying Gravity is Mary’s story. And the thing I keep coming back to is not her genius, impressive as it is. It is the moment she realizes that being right is not the same as being someone others can rely on.
She’s sent to Area 6. Hovering furniture, alien technology, a teacher with green skin who flashes colors when emotional. Mary walks in ready to prove herself, and she’s rejected by her coworkers.
The pivotal moment for me is near the end. Two men are trapped in a crippled spacecraft hurtling toward the moon. One of them has been awful to Mary. Dismissive. The kind of person who makes everything harder. She has every reason to let him figure it out himself.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she asks for a bowl of eggs and starts problem-solving out loud, using what she sees and touches to think through what the math alone cannot show her.
“I thought the whole world was against me – my professors, my classmates, even my peers – but I was really just working against myself.”
That is Mary’s arc in one line. And it is the kind of story I love writing – where the hero’s greatest obstacle turns out to be the part of herself she has been defending the hardest.
If you have not read Defying Gravity yet, this week is a good week to start.
📖 books2read.com/DefyingGravity
Most readers are done in an hour.
– Tony (and Lydia)
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