Erin Entrada Kelly won the Newbery Award for her middle grade novel, Hello, Universe in 2018. Unfortunately, I haven’t read Ms. Kelly’s award-winning book, but I did get a copy of her latest book, We Dream of Space. I thought it might be particularly interesting because it’s set in 1985-86, as a class and their space-loving teacher prepare for the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Engineer Husband just started working at NASA in the fall of 1985, and of course, we remember the Challenger disaster quite vividly.

So, We Dream of Space features a dysfunctional family: mom and dad, and three children, Cash, Fitch, and Bird. All three siblings are in the seventh grade because Fitch and Brid are twins, and Cash is doing seventh grade for a second year after failing his classes the previous year. As the story progresses, showcasing each of the three kids in alternating chapters, the writing is good, and the characters are very real and growing. Cash is trying to find out if there’s anything that he’s actually good at doing, since basketball and schoolwork are both out. Fitch is obsessed with playing games at the video arcade and trying to hold his temper. Bird wants to become the first female space shuttle commander as well as being the one person who attempts to hold the family together as they spin out in their separate orbits.

Wow, was this book a downer! It started out with a dysfunctional family, parents that call each other (expletive deleted) names all through the book and siblings that mainly ignore one another as much as possible, and it ended with the Cash, Fitch and Bird coming through their various difficulties with a small glimmer of hope in spite of the story’s climax in which the space shuttle Challenger explodes.

When I say “small glimmer of hope” I mean small. The hope is barely there, and I’m not sure young readers will see it at all. Maybe this story would be encouraging, something of a mirror, for those children who live in dysfunctional families like the one in the book, but I tend to think escapist literature is more appealing for many children (and adults) who live in hard situations. At least, Bird has her astronaut fantasies, Fitch his video games, and Cash his Philadelphia 76ers basketball games. The reader of this sad but true to life novel won’t get much more than a glimpse of a beginning of family growth, maybe. Is Ms. Entrada’s Newbery winner as sad and discouraging as this one is? If so, maybe I’ll just skip it.

WARNING: There will be spoilers in this review.

This book begins with a quote from Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” And author Nic Stone gives us a story that is an exploration of that idea as well as the accompanying truisms that “there’s sometimes more to people than meets the eye” and “people have a way of surprising you.” While the story is certainly timely with its depiction of racial tensions and the history of discrimination based on race in the past that sometimes continues into the present, some cursing and a flawed ending that buries the past instead of making it right make it unacceptable, IMHO.

In this middle grade novel, Scoob, who is black, and his G’ma, who is white, go on a road trip, following the route that G’ma and Scoob’s African American grandfather took through the South from Atlanta, Georgia headed to Juarez, Mexico more than forty years ago. The trip begins in a bid for freedom as Scoob joins G’ma, his favorite person in the world, in her new RV. When G’ma invites Scoob to “go on a little adventure”, little does he know that that adventure will take him halfway across the country as well as deep into his family’s past. And he accidentally, on purpose, leaves his cell phone behind so that Dad can’t spoil the adventure by reminding Scoob that he’s supposed to be grounded at home.

So the set-up for the story is pretty good, although it stretches credulity to swallow that Scoob doesn’t really notice at first that a brand new Winnebago has replaced G’ma’s MINI Cooper. Still, I was ready to go with it just as Scoob goes with the whole notion of a surprise road trip with G’ma. And the entire trip is full of surprises, with G’ma acting just like the grandmother Scoob has always known and loved, except when she doesn’t act like G’ma at all.

It was the ending that threw me. Of course, Scoob’s and G’ma’s adventure must come to an end, and it’s not exactly a good ending. That sad ending was not entirely unexpected. But my question is (spoiler alert): if I find a cache of jewels that my recently deceased grandmother stole, maybe recently, maybe forty years ago, what is my responsibility in regard to those jewels? Don’t I need to at least think about trying to return those jewels to their rightful owners? Or to the police? The fact that Scoob never even considers this idea, except in the case of one small set of earrings, is problematic, especially in a book written for middle grade readers.

This book is Nic Stone’s first middle grade novel, and it’s promising. The author works into the story a lot of information about racial injustice and civil right era history without being too preachy or teachy. Scoob and his G’ma are engaging characters, and I’m always up for a good road trip story. But I can’t quite bring myself to make peace with the ending. Maybe that’s because an ending where you bury the past instead of bringing it out into the light in all of its messiness and difficulty is just an unresolved ending, and a bad one.