The Wanderers Book Review: Three Astronauts Training for Mars and I Cared More About Their Families

Rating: ★★★★

"The Wanderers" Book Review:

The Wanderers is the rare space novel that understands the most dangerous part of going to Mars isn't the radiation or the landing — it's what the mission does to the people you leave behind. Meg Howrey wrote a book about three astronauts training for a simulated Mars mission, and what she actually wrote is a novel about the impossible distance between people who love each other.

Helen Kane is the American, a world-class astronaut with a teenage daughter she's never quite figured out how to mother. Yoshi Tanaka is the Japanese astronaut whose marriage is quietly unraveling. Sergei Kuznetsov is the Russian, haunted by a relationship with a cosmonaut who died and keeping secrets about his own fitness for the mission. The three of them are selected by a private space company called Prime Space to undergo a seventeen-month simulation of a Mars mission — a full dress rehearsal inside a habitat in the Utah desert, monitored by cameras and psychologists.

Howrey alternates between the astronauts inside the simulation and their families outside it. The simulation chapters are claustrophobic and psychologically precise — three people pretending they're on Mars while knowing they're in Utah, watching themselves be watched, performing competence while privately falling apart. The family chapters are where the novel's emotional center lives. Helen's daughter Meeps, navigating her mother's absence and her own emerging adulthood, is one of the most authentically written teenagers I've read.

The novel asks a question it never fully answers: how do you know whether an experience is real? The astronauts begin to lose track of where simulation ends and reality begins. Is their teamwork genuine or performed? Are the emotions they feel in the habitat real if the habitat isn't? Howrey treats these questions with the seriousness of philosophy and the lightness of good fiction.

Where it stumbles slightly is pacing. The novel's contemplative rhythm doesn't always generate enough momentum to carry its quieter stretches, and the ending — deliberate and ambiguous — may frustrate readers looking for resolution.

Mozhan Marnò, Ari Fliakos, and Sunil Malhotra narrate the three astronaut perspectives, and the multi-voice format works beautifully.

Four stars. A novel about going to Mars that's really about the distance between any two people.

If You Liked The Wanderers, Try:

• The Martian by Andy Weir — The engineering problem-solving version of a Mars novel. Completely different tone, equally committed to getting the details right.

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel — Another novel about performance, authenticity, and human connection in extreme circumstances. Same quiet power.

• An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield — A real astronaut's memoir that confirms everything Howrey imagined about the psychology of spaceflight.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter — a queer memoir that reads like a novel, following one person from Iowa to Broadway to Paris to a game show stage, learning at every stop that reinvention is the only survival skill that matters.

Learn More: How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter by Luke Stoffel