The Losers at the Center of the Galaxy
by Mary Winn Heider
Intermediate, Middle School    Little, Brown    304 pp.    g
3/21    978-0-7595-5542-6    $16.99
e-book ed.  978-1-484-78106-7    $9.99

Two years ago, Winston and Louise Volpe’s father Lenny — beloved former quarterback for the Chicago Horribles — walked away and disappeared, a hero “lost in time and space, done in by his own broken mind.” Now the siblings and their mother (“the incomplete Volpe family”) are dealing with his absence in their own ways. At their middle school, Louise has thrown herself into discovering a cure for brain damage in Science Club, Winston into playing tuba for the band. But then…what is behind the mysterious behavior of a group of Winston’s teachers? Is a ghost haunting the Chicago Horribles’ locker room? Can Louise find a way to free the Horribles’ live-bear mascot? Madcap antics ensue, but this is still, at its heart, a story of grief over the loss of a father and husband from CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy); as such, the novel would make a good companion to Jacqueline Woodson’s Before the Ever After (rev. 9/20). Heider deftly balances screwball action and humor with poignancy and even profundity, and offers a hopeful conclusion — in which Winston finds his own “center of the galaxy” with a fellow tuba player, Louise finds an achievable science project, and all the Volpe family members find support in one another.

From the March/April 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.