The third novel in Hannah Reynold’s Golden Doors series is a rom-com set on Nantucket with sexy and brainy surprises. Jordan has vowed she will enter no new relationships this summer before college, given how badly all of her others ended. She looks forward to helping her father out with his navigational research, and she jealously hopes to replace Ethan Barbanel, the young assistant he keeps praising. She ends up assisting a Black female astronomer who is tracking debris’s orbit around the earth. The work exposes the lively teen to the personal history of one astronomer’s accomplishments and the larger story of women’s ongoing struggle for recognition in the field.
Judaism doesn’t play as central a part in the plot as it did in Reynolds’s The Summer of Lost Letters, but it is a definite presence. The Barbanel clan, with whom Jordan is staying, celebrates Shabbat every Friday night. Jordan decides to reach out to her reserved father, who put Jewish observance aside when his wife, Jordan’s mother, died when Jordan was four. In a humorous subplot, Jordan subtly — and sometimes not so subtly — tries to match her father up with her astronomer boss.
This peppy first-person novel delights with lines like “I studied this boy who I resented and who I desired, who aggravated me and who made me laugh” and “Ethan was sometimes a golden retriever who wanted to make people feel better.” Throughout the book, Jordan must confront the challenges of research, political dilemmas, and her own emotions. Luckily, she has friends and family who’ll stand by her.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder and a school librarian for forty years in NYC, now resides in San Francisco, where she shares tales aloud in a local JCC preschool and volunteers with 826 Valencia to help students write their own stories and poems.
