Earthweight

About this book

At the Moon's south pole, in the company settlement of Malapert Town, children of the Charter staff ride a centrifuge every day so their bodies can someday go home to Earth. Children of contract workers, featherweights, grow too tall and too light ever to leave. Sixteen-year-old Juno Abara sweeps dust from airlock seals by day, and by night spins herself sick on a condemned centrifuge, training for the one Downward scholarship any lunar-born child can win, if she can stand for twenty minutes at full Earth gravity. The hall that hides her machine is scheduled for demolition. Scratched into its walls are names from a solar storm fifty-one years ago, and one of them is her grandmother's. Who survived that storm, what did it cost, and what will Juno have to leave behind to get out?