How to Become a Planet
by Nicole Melleby
Middle School    Algonquin    288 pp.    g
5/21    978-1-64375-036-1    $16.95
e-book ed.  978-1-64375-162-7    $9.99

As the book opens, twelve-year-old Pluto, so named for her mother’s space obsession, asks the Hayden Planetarium’s question-and-answer hotline how to create a black hole, because she wants to “just stop. Just turn off the lights and shut her eyes and stop.” Her soon-diagnosed depression and anxiety are severe enough that she stays home for the ­remainder of the school year. But by summer, she makes a list of goals in order to “be the real, full Pluto.” Her process of finding where she fits, including navigating her parents’ separation, is affecting, as she recalibrates her own self-expectations (attending a birthday party, for instance, is too much for now) and as a new friendship with ­gender-questioning Fallon begins to turn romantic. As always, Melleby (In the Role of Brie Hutchens..., rev. 3/20) naturally integrates her queer protagonist’s discovery of her sexuality into a larger story. The love of space that Pluto shares with her mother (whose own stress level is honestly portrayed) informs her way of thinking about herself and the world; Pluto’s interest in the history of the Challenger disaster is just one reason this introspective novel might appeal to fans of Erin Entrada Kelly’s We Dream of Space (rev. 3/20).

From the July/August 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.