We Dream of Space

I'm already off to a great start with my first post, since I returned this book to the library this morning without thinking about it. Whoops. 

Bird, Cash, Fitch, 1980's Historical Fiction, Space Metaphors, Challenger Shuttle~ 5,000+

Meet the Family~ 1,000+

In 1986 Delaware, a family waits for the Challenger space shuttle liftoff. Well, okay, one of them waits for it. Mom and Dad are too busy fighting (they might fight in every scene they're in), to care about space travel or their children. Cash failed seventh grade once and is about to fail again; broke his wrist and doesn't know where he fits into the world. Fitch, one of the twins, is angry all the time; at his best friend Vern (who sucks), at his family, at an awkward girl named Amanda Piper. And Bird, the other twin--Bird dreams of space. She loves space travel, the simplicity and functionality of machines. She draws schematics and wishes her family could work in perfect harmony, like the cogs of a wheel. Bird worships favorite teacher Ms. Solanga, who applied and was not selected for the Teacher in Space program. Ms. Solanga is the only adult who asks after Bird, Fitch, and Cash's homelife. 

Mommy's All Right, Daddy's All Right~ 10,000-

Mom and Dad (I think their names were Tammy and Mike, and were there ever two such quintessentially 80's names?) have a bad marriage. Maybe it's never been good? It's hard to tell. They fight in every scene they appear in, and seem to really, really hate each other. Like, why-are-they-still-even-married hate; don't ask me, it's never discussed. Dad's a misogynist and Mom's a second-wave feminist, so they have plenty to fight about, like why Mom has to work so much and doesn't spend more time housekeeping and that women have no business going to space with men, or with their bleeding vaginas and mood swings messing everything up. They're too busy fighting to pay any attention to their three kids, and the kids are struggling. Even when Cash breaks his wrist and Fitch is suspended, Mom and Dad can't be bothered. I kept thinking of them as abusive, and they're not--not really, not in the expected way of abusive parents--but they're intensely neglectful; too wrapped up in the squabbles of their failing marriage to do any meaningful parenting. These people live in misery, and I can't understand why they're still together. Dad seems to really hate Mom, and Mom knows full well her husband sucks. They don't separate or get divorced over the course of the novel, so presumably they continue making themselves and their children miserable for the rest of eternity. 

Bird's Holding the Family Together~ 500+

This is hard as hell to rate because Bird is a literal child who puts it on herself to keep her family afloat, and I love her. Also, I hate her parents for building an environment so miserable that their child feels like it's on her to make them into a loving, traditional family. She wishes her family could work with the perfect synchronicity of a well-built machine. Any time it appears a fight may start, Bird tries to knock it off course. The only problem is that Bird is, well, never a problem, so her parents and her brothers ignore her most of the time. Bird doesn't actually believe that happy families exist until she's invited to dinner at a friend's house. Afterwards, Bird tries to clean off the kitchen table so her family can eat dinner together, but Mom makes her stop. And omg, poor little baby! She just wants her family to spend time together and like each other, and none of them give a single shit. It's the saddest. 

Eventually, Bird has to confront the truth of the failure of machines when the Challenger space shuttle explodes after takeoff and it causes her to give up her quest for a perfectly functioning family. 

Remember SlimFast?~ 500,000-

This book treats fatness very strangely. Mom has some serious body image issues and is depicted packing a SlimFast for lunch and eating a salad when the rest of the family has pizza. She often criticizes what Bird eats, even though Bird is thin. This seems pretty accurate to the way fat people and fatness were treated by society in the 80's (and also for forever), but I'm not sure it's an element we needed to revisit in this Middle Grade novel. The wrongness of Mom's preoccupation with Bird's weight is noted in the narration, but that doesn't stop it from being jarring. There's also a moment when Dad and Cash are watching basketball and eating junk food, which Mom is, of course, very critical of. Fairly shortly after this (I think, I don't have a book to check), Cash decides to focus on being an athlete and notes he needs to stop eating a bunch of junk food. Which is true, a lot of athletes have a very structured diet! And also is weird when there's been so much focus on Mom criticizing everyone's eating habits. 

My biggest issue with this book and fatness is Amanda Piper. Amanda is a large person. She's the tallest girl in 7th grade and is described as having a roll of fat. She's got bushy hair and doesn't have many friends. Amanda also has the misfortune of developing a crush on Fitch. Fitch mostly isn't interested in girls at all, but he's especially not interested in Amanda, for the above mentioned reasons. Fitch's best friend, Vern--who Fitch basically hates for most of the book--teases Fitch about Amanda, and calls her all kinds of names like Chewbacca and Big Bird. Fitch snaps at Amanda during class and calls her something like "stupid, fat cow." Amanda is hurt and humiliated. She attempts to run from the room and falls down, because once you've been humiliated in front of the whole class, lets double down and make the fat girl fall over. Fitch gets in trouble with Ms. Solanga and his mother, and is suspended from school. He feels terrible about what he did to Amanda. And yet. Fitch's real crime is having said the quiet part out loud. Based on the subtle anti-fatness that permeates this book, it's fine to think badly of fat people as long as you don't say it to their face. Fitch becomes a sort of folk hero; his classmates believe he was standing up for himself against the mean fat girl. And does he bother explaining that Amanda didn't do anything wrong aside from like him and be fat? Nope. 

Will I be Pretty?~ 5,000-

Along with the anti-fatness, there's a through-line of Bird's preoccupation with being attractive. It starts when one of the popular girls in class tells Bird she isn't pretty (not meanly but it's still mean). Bird has never thought about her looks before and is startled to learn this. She has an imaginary conversation with Challenger astronaut, Judith Resnik, about how being pretty doesn't really matter. Bird is comforted. The exchange is Nice. Except that within the novel, prettiness does matter. Amanda Piper is notably not pretty, which is different and worse, from Bird's brand of not prettiness because Amanda is also guilty of being fat. 

Later, another of the popular girls (or maybe the same one, they're both named Jessica), tells Bird that a boy in their class, Devonte, might like Bird. Bird isn't interested in boys at all, and is alarmed that Devonte might have a crush on her. In an attempt to let him down easy, Bird takes Devonte aside to let him know she can't return his feelings. Only, Devonte doesn't have a crush on Bird at all and ends up telling her she's plain. Both instances of Bird not being cute come about as a way to make her feel small. Her family ignores her, Fitch (I think) tells her she'll never be an astronaut because she's just a girl from Delaware, and then multiple times she's made aware that she's not much to look at. But why does it have to be about her looks at all? She doesn't care about boys, she doesn't spend the any time worrying about getting her first kiss or first date. It makes sense that Bird would begin to contemplate her attractiveness in junior high, like as a part of development, and Imaginary Judith Resnik helping Bird realize that being pretty doesn't matter is a good, effective scene, but it doesn't make a ton of sense for her to care so much. I believe that the intent might be to say that being pretty is a way to fit in and she doesn't fit in, except that she does. People like her, no one makes fun of her, in the course of the novel she makes a friend. The book gives so many other reasons for Bird to feel inconsequential that the emphasis on her looks feels out of place.

Fitch and Cash and Easily Solved Problems~ 5,000-

This review has been Bird heavy, but Fitch and Cash are also focal characters within the novel. Bird definitely comes off as the main character--she's the one who wants to go to space, she's the glue holding the family together, her emotional distress is the culmination point of the book--but Fitch and Cash are having their own crises. 

Cash has already failed seventh grade once, and is on track to fail again. He dreams of being a basketball star, like his hero Dr. J (weirdly, a thing about NBA history is on TV right now, featuring Dr. J), but Cash is awful at basketball. He also falls on ice and breaks his wrist, so even if he was any good, he wouldn't be playing. Cash has a crush on a girl but she has a brainiac boyfriend (don't worry, Cash and the girl get in a fight, and the fact that he had a crush on her and was trying to win her over is totally forgotten). He struggles with school, he's not a good athlete, his best friends are popular and kind of bullies, and he has no one he can really talk to. And then he realizes he should become a track star! So he starts doing his homework! And everything is fine!

Fitch has anger problems. He's angry at his parents, at his siblings, at terrible Vern, and especially at Amanda Piper. His temper turns on a dime, and he's always ready to explode. Amanda Piper is finally what makes Fitch blow over, and his agony and guilt fuels more rage. Eventually, he apologizes to Amanda, who doesn't accept, but it's all good because Fitch feels totally absolved. Much like with Cash's decision to become a track star, Fitch's anger magically goes away! And everything is fine!

So much of being in junior high is trying to find your place as the world, and your body, change around you. That Cash is lost and Fitch is angry makes perfect sense given their ages and terrible parents. That the novel resolves their problems so quickly and easily, when others are allowed to linger, doesn't exactly track. Since many of their issues stem from their parents' constant fighting (which doesn't change at all), there is no real reason for things to improve for Cash and Fitch so drastically except that the plot needs to move along so the brothers can be a support system for Bird when the Challenger explodes. 

The Challenger Inevitably Explodes~ no rating? 

This novel is a chronicle of the lead up to the Challenger's liftoff. I wasn't alive when the Challenger exploded, but I grew up in the 90's, and was very well aware of the tragedy. Is it something most kids in 2021 know about? Is it regularly taught in school? I don't know if it's a historical tragedy that gets a lot of room in the curriculum in the present day, so I struggled to put myself in the mindset of the intended reader of this book. For me, knowing that the Challenger will  explode added a certain kind of dread, like watching Titanic and knowing that nothing good will be happening to Jack and Rose. But what about kids who don't know, what's that experience like? Within the narrative, we don't experience the Challenger exploding. We know that Bird is watching, but we aren't in her POV when it happens. We learn about it later as  Bird processes what she saw, but very abstractly. This is a very typically Middle Grades way to deal with traumatic events, but by turning away from the event itself, the emotional impact is diminished. But maybe that's not true for middle grade readers? Maybe not knowing makes the moment more powerful? Reading as a thirty-something person, I feel like hinging the turning point of the novel on a famous historical tragedy that the intended audience might not know about, which is then handled very delicately, doesn't work. 

Who is this Book for, Anyway??~ 1,000-

Which, ultimately, leads me to: I'm not sure who this book is for. Yes, it's a Middle Grades novel, but is it really for readers in that age group? The book plays a lot with what are considered typical characteristics of MG. There is no real home-away-home narrative; the kids don't really have a loving, safe home to go away from. It ends with Fitch and Cash realizing their sister is in distress, taking her outside to eat dinner together under the stars. So really it's an away-home narrative, even though the parents are not part of this new home, so it's not really a homecoming. Another typical aspect of MG is that everything is resolved in a tidy way. This is true for Fitch and Cash, and maybe becoming true for Bird, but not at all for their terrible parents (which means that there is no true resolution for Fitch and Cash). The handling of the Challenger explosion is also pretty typical of MG, turning away from a horrific event. The Challenger explosion is the turning point, the thing that brings the siblings back together, and with the way the explosion is handled within the narrative, the emotional impact might not hit unless you already knew about the Challenger tragedy. 

In a book club recently, someone said that a book we read felt like, "something for the parents." That's how I feel about We Dream of Space. Maybe it has an audience with older middle graders, already dabbling in YA (this is especially true with the way that it doesn't follow all the typical MG "rules"), but it read more like a novel written for people who grew up in the 80's and 90's to share with their kids.

Verdict: This book didn't do it for me. It's fine, I guess, but it wouldn't be my number one recommendation for Middle Graders who are interested in space travel, historical fiction, or dysfunctional families (I think calling them dysfunctional is not an accurate description). Also, there's a weird line about Ronald Reagan being tough and standing up to the Soviets, and I will have no praise of Regan, however small.