description: When Canadian astronaut Barbara Urie blasts into space, her disaster-relief worker husband is too busy to attend, and her adult children, Helen and Paul, are too conflicted to turn up, so NASA provides actors to stand in for her family at the Florida launch site. Naturally, this launches the horrified children into a whole new layer of identity crisis in Catherine Bush's Gen-X treatise, Minus Time. It's not that the Uries are a dysfunctional family--indeed Barbara, husband David, and engineering student son Paul are all hyper-achievers. But daughter Helen just wants to be normal, and while her mother makes history orbiting in space, she joins a radical group of animal liberationists and desperately pretends to have a normal, sitcom-perfect home life. Minus Time offers glimmers of the themes of risk and safety that define Bush's follow-up novel, The Rules of Engagement, and doesn't shy away from sweeping themes like what it means to grow up Canadian in the shadow of U.S. culture. But at its rawest, Minus Time reveals the confusion and rage of a woman who can't quite forgive her mother for fulfilling career dreams at the expense of a dubious and elusive family ideal: "One day [Helen] pulled out Madame Bovary, which she read in hours, haunted afterward not by Emma but Emma's daughter, left behind at the end, ignored and half-wild, who had no clothes that fit her and had never been taught to read. What, she asked the dead and faraway M. Flaubert, was going to happen to her?" --Deirdre Hanna 
language: English
title: Minus time
titlecomplete: Minus time
genres: Canada, Fiction
ratings_count: 80
publisher: Hyperion