In ascension

Martin McInness

Synopsis

A woman grew up in the netherlands. She had a father that used to be fisherman and then worked as a civil servant in water management that beat her. A mother mathematician that was siglthy autistic and a smaller sister. 
She falls in love with water and all the micro-biome found in it. She becomes a marine biologist and has the chance to be there when a new underwater cavity is found, with proto-cells. She gets to dive there and somehow, her and her teammates forget what happens when they dive. 
Later, she gets to work on creating lab food from algae for a space mission, a weird contact mission. 
She gets to go on the mission, with 2 other men - and they never reach contact. 
In the end, we learn that the sister never really identified her childhood as difficult like the protagonist did. 

My take

It was a well-written book, with lots of small ideas that made you think/dream. The sci-fi elements were not amazing for me, and that's ok because that was not what the book was about. Somehow, for me, it echoed Carl Sagan's Contact a lot. 

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